The abyss and the home: Ecopoetics and political imagination in Si una emergència, by Mireia Calafell

Abstract

This article offers a critical reading of Si una emergència (Carles Riba Prize 2023), by Mireia Calafell, within the framework of ecopoetics. The study is based on the idea that the book articulates a poetics of vulnerability and interdependence, in which collapse and regeneration are parts of the same movement. Drawing on ecofeminist theorists such as Yayo Herrero and Anna Tsing, the analysis examines how Calafell displaces the modern notion of the autonomous subject in order to expand the poetic voice, aware of its relational condition. The first part of the collection unfolds as a landscape of ecological and emotional collapse, where the poet denounces paralysis in the face of destruction and links intimate mourning to planetary grief. As the book progresses, however, the gaze opens toward the possibility of regenerating life and language from within the ruins. The poem thus becomes a space of care, memory and political imagination. Si una emergència emerges as a proposal for affective resistance in the era of the Capitalocene: an invitation to rethink fragility and uncertainty as sources of strength and to imagine shared futures grounded in the recognition of interspecies relationality.