about
Marta Núñez Pouzols is a poet and translator from Andalusia, Spain. She immigrated to the Triangle area of North Carolina in 2008, and currently lives in Durham.
She co-authored with Argentine poet Maia Morosano the bilingual collection Pronombres siderales/Starry Selves (Turba, 2019.) Her poems can be found in La bella Varsovia, Telegráfica, Works & Days, Lute & Drum, and DREGINALD. At UNC-Chapel Hill, she taught courses on film, hispanic literature, and Spanish language. Marta co-curates the reading series Paradiso and organizes Moon Palace, a horizontal writers’ workshop. She also writes critical pieces and reviews on film and sound.
Her manuscript The Giant Squid is inspired by divinatory hermeneutics, incantatory language, and dystopian traditions. This collection explores individual and collective grief.
Her last manuscript is Waiting Room, a poetic prose memoir that uses the surface of words and the interaction between English and Spanish as a point of departure to reflect on memory and experience.
pronombres siderales / starry selves
Pronombres Siderales/Starry Selves (Turba, 2019) by Maia Morosano and Marta Núñez Pouzols. Bilingual edition, English and Spanish.
Reviews
To Purchase
Venmo $13 to @Marta-NunezPouzols and include an address. US domestic shipping included.
Pronombres siderales reminds us that the gods too have moodswings, speaking in affective, imagistic eruptions where the highs gleam like “océanos psicodélicos” and the lows like “ríos de roedores.” Across continents and idioms of the Spanish tongue, Núñez and Morosano craft “una sintaxis de fuego,” ornately and multiply hewn from monsters and stars, from pop songs and drugs, from memory and from flesh: “el cuerpo es un círculo”/ “el cuerpo es un viaje.” The zodiac unfolds elegantly here inside the psyche’s hall of mirrors so that the images propagate wildly in the present and in the eternal no-time of mythology. These poems return us to infinity. Laura Jaramillo
A birth chart can be understood as the fragmentation produced by the division of someone’s life in 360 degrees, which correspond to successive moments in their existence. The poems that form this book are mercurial fractions as well. They are a dialogue, line by line, between the 360 degrees of two different charts. This Mercury is not the poisonous one, but the one that heals us, allowing us to find our own time in someone else’s, and encouraging us to discover our own fractions and astrological pieces in the words of two writers living in two different places and speaking two different languages. Starry Selves is not a book on astrology, it is an astrologer instead, a star teller, and an interpreter. It is a timeless oracle, such as a birth chart or the universe itself. Alma del universo
publications
“Crowning of The Weeping Bride,” “Up That Hill,” and “The Arrival of The Squid: 3” in issue 23 of Dreginald.
“The Dinosaur’s Debt” in Works & Days Vol. 1: Winter 2022
“The Arrival of The Squid: 4” in The Concern Reading Series Anthology
“The Arrival of The Squid: 2” in Triangle Poetry 2021
“La poesía quiere ser social.” Rapallo, n 6. Essay co-written with Laura Jaramillo.
Poem in the Spanish literary magazine Telegráfica, n 2.
translations
Stream of Deer (Full Page Publishing, 2014) by Kamran Mir Hazar.
“Pan/Vino” by Laura Jaramillo. Revista Casa de las Américas # 304-305 julio-diciembre/2021 pp. 85-86.
Pronombres siderales/Starry Selves (Turba, 2019) by Maia Morosano and Marta Núñez Pouzols. Bilingual Edition.
(Unpublished) Translation into Spanish of The Tranquilized Tongue by Eric Baus
appearances
Voice and text in track Space Regained, collaboration with Glyn Maier included in compilation in essence (enmossed).
Collaboration with Chanelle Allesandre in tarot&word based performance at In a Sense/In Essence series at Lump Gallery in Raleigh, NC in September, 2024.
Collaboration with doris dana in word&sound based performance at grow with us vol. 1 festival at Lump Gallery in Raleigh, NC in June, 2024.
Third voice in the recording of Jeff Russell’s choral poem A Surfer’s Paradise (Dream Pop Press).
Festival Internacional de Poesía en Rosario (FIPR). Invited poet to the 30th edition of the International Poetry Festival in Rosario, Argentina in October, 2022. Participated in the program “Poesía en las escuelas.” @fiprosario
Served as a juror for the Southern Documentary Fund Emergency Research & Development Grant in 2020.
reviews and journalistic pieces
Description of compilation in essence, curated by Chanelle Allesandre and released by enmossed.
Description of taupe set xl’s swamp prayer, released by enmossed.
Description of Sachi Kobayashi’s Clouds in the Sky, released by enmossed.
Description of Florian T M Zeisig’s You Look So Serious, released by enmossed.
Descriptions of the first two albums in the ENMS cassette series, released by enmossed.
“Electronic Dance Music Is Big Business, but Local Heads Are Holding It Down for Unprofitable Liberation,” IndyWeek 2020.
“Amazon’s New “Welcome to the Blumhouse” Series Is More Farcical Than Fearsome,” IndyWeek 2020.
“Marv Lets Synths Take the Lead on Their Experimental Debut,” IndyWeek 2020.
“Poet Lamar Wilson on His Annual Thirteen-Mile Run to Protest a Lynching,” IndyWeek 2019.
“50 Local Albums and Songs We Loved in 2019,” IndyWeek 2019.
“In “Pain and Glory,” Pedro Almodóvar Is Honest About His Life but Guarded About His Psyche,” IndyWeek 2019.
“Full Frame: A Reverend Fights Gentrification with Astonishing Art in David de Rozas’s Short Film Give,” IndyWeek 2019.
“Our Top 15 Films of 2018,” IndyWeek 2018.
“Quería entender por qué hay gente que odia a otra gente,” Diagonal 2013.
paradiso and moon palace
Marta’s been invested for years in creating fertile spaces for local poets and writers to be in conversation with each other and expose their work. She also organizes DIY cultural events regularly for the local community at large to benefit from the production of their neighboring writers and touring ones.
Paradiso
Paradiso is a reading and performance series for (inter)national & hyper-local literature in the Durham/Chapel Hill area of North Carolina, curated by Marta Núñez Pouzols and Laura Jaramillo. It currently happens at Shadowbox Studio in Durham, NC.
Moon Palace
Moon Palace is a horizontal writers’ workshop in the Durham/Chapel Hill area of North Carolina organized by Marta Núñez Pouzols since 2018.
astrology and tarot
Marta Núñez Pouzols has been practicing traditional astrology and reading tarot professionally since 2017.
She is currently a student of Austin Coppock.