“Luis Muñoz is a miniaturist writing amorous, sharp-pointed, sneakily clever poems.
I love how his work penetrates, like a fine needle, the weird iridescence of human experience.”
Henri Cole
I love how his work penetrates, like a fine needle, the weird iridescence of human experience.”
Henri Cole
“Although Luis Muñoz’s poems are short, they are capacious in scope and soul. In the poem ‘Love,’ love is described as ‘the size at first / of the precise cut / of the window.’ In such a short poem, every word carries immense weight. ‘At first’ implies time, a future, and change, while ‘precise cut’ implies a future love that is absent of precision. Every poem in One Moment rewards reading, re-reading, and refracting to emerge at new insights, new moments.”w insights, new moments.”
Victoria Chang
Victoria Chang
“Scraps of portraits, fragments of postcards, conversations blurred or revealed by a synesthetic atmosphere coexist to form a constellation of moments stolen from the rubble of existence. Each word, for an instant, shines—bound to a liberated syntax born of a personal diction, a diction forged through an intimacy that lingers around time itself.”
Juan Antonio Bernier
Juan Antonio Bernier
“The mystery of this latest poetry by Luis Muñoz lies in its own melancholy before a landscape that evokes, with emotion, both return and immediate absence. The Sierra de Guadarrama comes alive in this conjunction of poetry and painting, so that the poetic evocations and pictorial outbursts reflect searches, explorations, and returns, while the eternal symbols—a path, a river—mirror the flow and passing of moments that follow one another and slip away. For, in the end, evening and absence will crown this exceptional confluence of the visual and the lyrical that Luis Muñoz and Montse Lago have achieved so wonderfully.”
Francisco Javier Díaz de Revenga
Francisco Javier Díaz de Revenga
"Con Vecindad. Luis Muñoz ha publicado uno de los mejores libros de poesía de la década”.
Juan Carlos Abril
Juan Carlos Abril
“Dylan Thomas said a good poem was ‘a contribution to reality,’ and that’s the phrase I kept thinking while reading One Moment—how each of Muñoz’s very, very good poems broadened my field of vision, then filled it. I could practically sense the earth expanding beneath my feet. Muñoz writes, ‘With the orange finger / of his thinking / he draws pathways’—everywhere, this mineral clarity, this cartography of yearning-so-deep-trembles. It’s Andrade, it’s Donne, it’s Oppen. No one today sounds like this. It’s thrilling to encounter poetry this fresh, this undeniable.”
Kaveh Akbar
Kaveh Akbar
“Never have I read work so companionable and desperate at once. This is what Wallace Stevens would call the ‘intensest rendezvous,’ the moment when the world finds a silent and sometimes terrifying shape. Only a spirit both fierce and gentle can illuminate experience this way, with such a delicate tenacity. If Muñoz offered me his hand for a walk to Hell, I’d take it.”
Katie Peterson
Katie Peterson
“Luis Muñoz tells us who we are by pointing to our absences. He is the investigator of that hardest thing: the quiet moment. Muñoz’s tender attentiveness to moments made me think often of Machado.”
Ilya Kaminsky
Ilya Kaminsky
“El apetito (…) seems at first a peaceful landscape, a calm film, almost drawn with a ruler—until you suddenly discover that it is a latent threat, that beneath it almost pulses a crime, and that in fact it is a challenge.
You must all at once uncover the murderer—or the possible corpse—by deciphering the codes where the lines break, the place where they shift and turn.
Instead of a discreet or placid reader (though it may allow for that too), the book turns you into a spy or a furtive reader, a detective moving through a landscape of unease.”
Juan Carlos Rodríguez
You must all at once uncover the murderer—or the possible corpse—by deciphering the codes where the lines break, the place where they shift and turn.
Instead of a discreet or placid reader (though it may allow for that too), the book turns you into a spy or a furtive reader, a detective moving through a landscape of unease.”
Juan Carlos Rodríguez
“With such a simple title, Vecindad—how much these poems tell us, how many dazzling collisions occur between words in the verses of Luis Muñoz. It is his specialty: to illuminate us. I believe that this search, this tracing of the meaning of life through language, is essential in his poetry—and in poetry in general. That search is always at the core of any poetry that refuses to become merely fireworks (or wordplay): his lines ‘feed you / and leave you hungry,’ as he writes in the poem ‘Centimeter by Centimeter.’ Centimeter by centimeter, yes. Nothing less. It is the ambition of a poet who wants words to clash so that sparks will fly. Because words are not empty; they hold within them a fullness of emotion and knowledge that enlightens us. Very often, what seems irrational brings us the deeper meaning—the disturbance of being alive.”
Ángeles Mora
Ángeles Mora
Luis Muñoz, Vecindad, 2024
“Here is a poet who understands the unrepeatability of everything, our isolation, our communion with others, what moves and what resists, eros and the ineffable. He is brilliant.”
Carolyn Forché
Carolyn Forché
"These brilliant poems haunt me, alter my sense of what a poem can be"
Frank Bidart
Frank Bidart
“Now, more distilled, more subtle, the poems in Querido silencio unfold—within their essential instability—a poetics that Luis Muñoz sets against the very limits of what can be expressed, in search of a mysterious beyond to the consciousness of everyday reality.”
Fancisco Díaz de Castro
Fancisco Díaz de Castro
“This is the best book I’ve ever read about desire. Not about love, but about desire.”
Vicente Tortajada
Vicente Tortajada
Luis Muñoz, Guadarrama, 2023
