THE BALCONY 
A lockdown essai

RICARDO MARX
 
ISBN: 978-1-915341-18-1
/////// 114 Pages
 
The Balcony begins with a dream. In this dream, several possibilities for building a world that does not yet exist are imagined, a future world that can be either an utopian one or a dysphoric place, or both. In the main part of the text there is a dialogue between two characters, but the main character could be the balcony that gives it its title, the protagonist that speaks to himself.

Like an alphabet-dictionary for the everyday things that happened in our confined days, this balcony stems from a stream of consciousness frame of mind and ends up mapping a territory of what happens indoors, when we are alone but not solitary, face to face with our thoughts.
 
Ricardo Marques (Sintra, Portugal 1983) is a poet and translator who, among dozens of other poets, has translated Anne Carson, Billy Collins and Patti Smith into Portuguese.
In 2021, he published the anthology Já não dá para ser moderno (Vila do Conde, Flan de Tal), in which he proposes a reading of six Portuguese poets from the present day.
His latest book is Desiderio, a personal anthology of his edited and unpublished poems under the prism of love, beauty and desire (Lisboa, não (edições), 2022).
In 2023 he won a literary creation grant from the Ministry of Culture to write a new book of poetry.