Author Spotlight: Omar Bárcena
- letraslatinasblog2
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Buy: Naturaleza Urbana by Omar Bárcena | Valparaíso Ediciones, Granada, Spain | June 2025 | ISBN: 979-13-87538-16-3
What non-living poet/writer had the biggest influence on your book?
José Emilio Pacheco. I had fled together with my wife, to Mexico City during the 2009 recession with plans to never come back to the USA. There I replaced NPR with RadioUNAM. When we did come back to the USA in 2011, I kept listening to RadioUNAM via streaming, and cooking one day in Downtown Los Ángeles I heard the voice of Margarita Castillo recite Perra en la tierra by José Emilio Pacheco. And that’s when it clicked, “that’s what I want to be, I want to be a poet. A Mexican poet.”
Can you talk about your use of form and theory?
I started writing poetry, as most do nowadays, in free verse. Now that I know form, I love it and I now try to abide by whatever form the first drafts of my poems resemble. Molding them, perhaps forcing them into form. Naturaleza Urbana does not follow form, but it is more aware of it than my first book is, Poemas desde el otro lado, which completely ignored it.
What are some key themes present in your book?
This book's main theme is how nature manifests itself in an urban environment. How humans try to control it or deny its existence; how we fear it, despite us being the more dangerous species.
To paraphrase the back cover: Naturaleza Urbana narrates nature’s manifestations within an urban context from an urbanite’s point of view. It narrates how humans observe, live, negate, or try to control nature in a metropolis; here, nature is not just observed and described, it is motivated, invoked, and thanked. This poetry collection is an accomplice to nature, in its quotidian struggle to keep existing in so much urbanity.
What was your writing process? Your editing process? Did you adopt a unique process for this book, or do you have a “go-to” approach for all your writing?What’s your favorite line(s) from your book? How did your relationship with your family influence your writing?Is there a connection to your past in your book?
Only in the dedication where I credit my paternal grandmother for teaching me how to enjoy nature passively, which happened in a misunderstood location, the border between the United Mexican States and the United States of América; as Border Patrol Broncos sped by creating huge dust clouds; meanwhile, lizards kept on doing push-ups and we kept on tending the garden.
You can often tell a lot about a book by how it begins and how it ends. What is the first line and last line of your book?
Excluding the titles and front and back-end material, the first and last lines are:
Nunca imaginé poder verte cara a cara // con nuestra cara torre de frio acero
How did you get into writing? Can you pinpoint a memory where it all began for you?
I was in my third year of French in High School, and we were assigned to write a poem, in French, of course. I was horrified. I felt I didn’t know enough French; I felt I knew nothing about poetry, let alone writing it. But I did it, I had to, and I loved the outcome. That was my first poem ever, and the only one I have written in French. Shortly after that, I started an underground literary paper with a classmate who had the tools for print publishing; it was called Under the Tree after the tree that was between the two French classrooms, were we would shelter from the desert sun and the 110°F+ weather.
If you could have a dinner party with anyone living or dead, who would it be and why? What would you serve for dinner?
I would like to have dinner with the ghosts of my maternal grandfather and my paternal grandmother. I would serve them enchiladas like my mother taught me how to make them, with Mexican wine even if they didn’t drink. I want to know how my grandfather died, if he had a heat stroke, if someone ran him over first, or if he just fell off his bike like anyone would. He would cross the border every day on his bicycle to gather left overs from the KFC in Calexico to feed his pigs in Mexicali, he was still doing this approaching 100 years of age, and one day he didn’t make it back, he was found disfigured by cars on a bridge over the New River, it is unknown which part of the accident came first or at all or in what sequence. For my grandmother, she was my mentor and, in essence, my mother. I want to know if she was just tired of living, having been in some ways forced to move to the USA, and her compromise was moving to the border for easy access to both, of course she couldn’t stop smoking, but was that more than a chemical dependency?
Omar Bárcena was born and raised straddling Alta and Baja California, in Mexicali and Calexico. His two poetry collections, Poemas desde el otro lado and Naturaleza Urbana were published in Spain by Valparaíso Ediciones but written in Los Ángeles. He was a 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee for Flying Ketchup Press for his poems in their trilingual anthology, the Very Edge Poems; his flash-fiction appeared in Issue 111 of Burningword Literary Journal; his short story Amor-Temor is in the anthology Huellas del Norte from Palabra Herida of Colombia; and he was a finalist for the 2024 Harbor Review Chapbook Editor’s Prize.
