The first English-language collection of one of Spain's most exciting emerging authors performs and interrogates the desires and disillusionments of millennial culture.García Sierra, one of the central figures of the Spanish young literature movement, constructs bold, strange, uncomfortable poems from everyday life, touching on mental illness, drugs, and heartbreak. His work is widely published (in New Wave Vomit, Ciudades Esqueleto, Playground, and Revista tn, among others) and his first novel, Facendera (Editorial Anagrama, 2022), has brought him broad critical acclaim in Spain. HOUSTON, I'M THE PROBLEM, a selection from his first poetry collection topped off with more recent poems, is the first of his books to appear in English translation."In HOUSTON, I'M THE PROBLEM, the long line is made new again in all its inertia and obsession. Óscar García Sierra's recursive poems hoard and catalog the anxieties of language and living, revealing the ways in which outside forces 'self' us. They are searching systems, sending out dispatches in an atmosphere of desire and disappointment under capitalism. I was thrilled to be reunited with such endangered phrases as 'I feel like, ' 'I feel as if, ' 'I hope, ' 'I wish, ' 'I want, ' and 'I think' in this collection. Medicated, anaphoric, depressed, dryly humorous, and insistent, these pop-nihilist poems are so full, you can't help but think of them as beautiful holes dragging themselves through the wreckage of the page. I feel as though I've been hooked up to an IV of something I didn't know I was lacking."--Emily Skillings"The achievement of HOUSTON, I'M THE PROBLEM, resides in García's creation of a poetic universe of his own, which rises up to claim a new creative path where the borders between the arts start to shake."--Laura Villar, Compostimes"García Sierra uses long, expansive lines to craft a personal story of disenchantment with the world around him and the uncertain future that lies ahead."--Leo Boix, Morning StarPoetry.
