CARTAGENA THINKS: JUAN CARLOS MESTRE `ASSEMBLY. COLLECTED POETRY 1975-2025´

CARTAGENA THINKS: BOOK PRESENTATION. JUAN CARLOS MESTRE `ASSEMBLY. COLLECTED POETRY 1975-2025´

Assembly: Collected Poems 1975-2025 is an extraordinary and overflowing book that brings together all the poetry of the writer and visual artist Juan Carlos Mestre. Gifted with an astonishing verbal imagination, Mestre has built, over half a century, a rich and inhabitable body of work, marked simultaneously by wonder and critical ferocity, aesthetic rigor and indignant solidarity with the dispossessed of the world. The "assembly" of the title is that of the living and the dead who have never had a voice, all gathered in the space of the poem, summoned by the word to speak their truth. This book, a testament to exceptional talent and a sustained fidelity to the imperatives of the imagination, is already one of the landmark works of contemporary Spanish poetry.

Juan Carlos Mestre —poet, engraver, and essayist—is one of the leading figures in contemporary poetry. Among other accolades, he has received the Adonáis Prize in 1986 and the Gil de Biedma Prize in 1992 for *La poesía ha caído en desgracia* (Poetry Has Fallen into Disgrace). With *La tumba de Keats* (Keats's Tomb), written during his time at the Spanish Academy in Rome, he won the Jaén Poetry Prize in 1999. In 2009, he received the National Poetry Prize for *La casa roja* (The Red House), in 2012 the Critics' Prize for Castilian Poetry, and in 2018 the Castile and León Prize for Literature for his body of work.
As an engraver, he has received numerous prestigious awards and exhibited his work in Spain, Europe, and the Americas.

Presented by: Luis G. Adalid, artist and editor of contemporary graphic arts and poetry.

DATE: June 5, 2026

TIME: 7:00 PM

VENUE: Auditorium of the Roman Theatre Museum