Ylonka Nacidit-Perdomo

Ylonka Nacidit-Perdomo is a poet, essayist, and editor. She was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic and studied law and political sciences at the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo (UASD). Her poems have been published in Common Threads Afro-Hispanic, Women’s Literature, Supplement 14 International Poetry, Y vamos haciendo camino, Revista Mairena, and Confluencia. In addition, she has published the poetry books: Contacto de una mirada (1989), Arrebatos (1993), Luna Barroca (1996), Papeles de la noche (1998), Octubre (1998), Triángulo en trébol (1999), Triángulo en trébol /Triangle in trefoil (2001, translation: Linda M. Rodríguez Guglielmoni), Hacia el sur (2001), La sombra del amor (2007) and Contemplación (2007). Also, she has published the following books on literary criticism: Alfonsina Storni: A través de sus imágenes y metáforas (1998), Altagracia Saviñon o la discontinuidad del instante (1998), Sobreaviso, escritura de mujeres (1998), La circularidad enigmática de la mirada (2000), and Contrapunto, Desconcierto y Territorios Afectivos de Mujeres (2001). For her book, Altagracia Saviñón o la discontinuidad del instante, the International Writers and Artists Association awarded her “Best Editor Essay 1998”.

For various years she held the position of Literary Research Center Director at the National Library in Santo Domingo. She now holds the position of president of the Association of Dominican Literary Criticism of Hispanic American Women Writers (CDLEH), and directs the collection entitled “Cotidianas de Estival”. Moreover, she directs the Founding Committee of Women’s Festivals and directs the collection “Ventana” of the Solidarity Center for the Development of Women (Ce-Mujer) in Santo Domingo. In 2002 she directed the XIII Conferencia de la Asociación Internacional de Literatura Femenina Hispánica (AILFH) and in 2004 she directed the 9th International Conference of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars.

Comments on her work:

“On the literary map Ylonka Nacidit Perdomo is the first Dominican of the contemporary Caribbean neo-baroque”.  Luis A. Jimenez, Department of Modern Languages, Florida Southern College.

“Nacidit-Perdomo is a poet of love and nature. She uses symbolism to trap the reader within a beautiful landscape…”.   Clementina R. Adams, Clemson University.

“Surprising and intriguing she represents a challenge to the reader... The poetic language of the next century is going to be a version of the language that inhabits Nacidit-Perdomo’s poetry.”  Linda M. Rodríguez Guglielmoni, University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez Campus.

“The marked active glance, the glance that operates by variation, expansion, opening a map of the city in constant making...”.   Ester Gimbernat Gonzalez, Northern Colorado University.

triangle in trefoil, perhaps love fractures sadness?  (poem)

by Ylonka Nacidit-Perdomo. Poet of Dominican Republic

vertebrae in the throat of the wave. afternoons. green avenues. silences. windows. grand hours of saying enough. hurricane. sweet glance. moons that fall at the humid air of monday. alone quiet. absolute. i return crying from the rain with yellows melting from your mouth].

there is love: triangle in trefoil. evanescent paradox. plural. in armistice. presuming it temporal and useless.

love: key word of the dislocation. instant of the irreversible infinitude. space and time. it is enough to have the night. the indexes of the presence to find the real numbers of that conditional game between the legs. that protests before the mirror. in angles of expecting.

once again i read that perennial image that in sappho’s phrase “...it is far / and I only one thing would desire / see its light and elastic steps / and the flashes from its face...”.

love: rain that surprisingly overwhelms. something that is seen approaching in the oracle with unicorns. in the representation of quietness. whose access is achieved through the hour of dream as open syntax under the shade. in the intimidated distance extended in the mountain. in diverse ascents towards the light. towards the horizon that fragments scarabs of grass. the asymmetry of circular time. the sea on the margins of the sand precisely when the order becomes full with infinite remnants of color.

i listen that you arrive. you arrive of sand with lightning that draws the tender tenderness of your mouth that invades the grilles. the smile mischievous. the hurry of the clock. your open arms. stealing nights. slums of doubts. the enclosure that you inhabit. the jacket you drench with expecting].

love: eternal dislocation. whirlwind of words. beautiful coincidence provoked. apperceptive liberty. symbol in synthesis of the fugacity of giving oneself at the insistence of the instance.

perhaps love fractures sadness? the romantic saga. to fade out the beloved. the long season of summer. the writing of the re-encounter in registries of the itinerant beauty of the myth or territories that look out in wandering albums?

so many times that we have seen love with the gleam of normality. in a web of ulterior voyages at inverse. in a sunny siesta re-inventing the origin. the beginning. the slippery silence. the elliptical fantasy of the polyvalent intensity. the gestures of the body in multiple voices. excluding him in the unrestrained fold of a fictive confidential level.

without doubts. from the other shore of the text proliferates my surprise at constructing love. of writing repeated connotations. disparities that are articulated, that take out appointments and break out in dialogue.

i do not know if to remain silent. if to traverse space with fevers of sea].

then i initiate the question that sappho left when she inaugurated a different canon in occidental poetics when inscribing sexuality with a superior vision of beauty and lyrics as aesthetics or image of desire. from her dissident i. in her reiterated transgression of being suspicious or culpable of loving “alone.” openly tangible. the breaking line of the audacious waves against the rocks.

does love have impunity when the hands fear a caress, the imposed silence? the cards of chance in the impeccability. in the memory and the intimate version of fear that pushes towards confinement. to the construction of the feminine subject in another place and another space. betting at fiction. to the double standard of a private code?

silent. next to the feminine is represented the woman with the sound of the wind. with the intensity of dreaming again the sanctifying conjecture that adjures of love’s madness. that is re-born in the uproar of torment. in the interiority-against-memory that refracts one. two. three faces of the ahistorical “feminine”.

if he would draw again the sleeping grass. plaintive leaves of the scenery of earth. the schedules nor the tuesdays nor dark chestnut would matter].

love. the love. the love punctually advances from itself until it becomes undone in flirtations. in multiple seduction. it does not resist. it needs a soft hand not to die. not to return to the glance the encumbrances of the canon. the inquisitive equilibrium of the phrase. of creation.

i write the most awkward way of feeling your absence. i do not know if you would come to me sunning the solitude of the rain. voices of summer. little pieces of the dew of flowers].

love. the love has a scripture that dis(arms) its complexity. the coordinates of the limitable and the infallible.

the night breaks the seashells that hang from your face. lights from the round window].

there is the departure. the known body. the explosion of fire. the five senses burning themselves. erasing the customs. the discursive sexuality. the bindings. the hypothesis of “i love you” as a refuge or condemnation. as suicidal voice. ambivalent. manipulating. comprehensive. hypocrite.

one discovers “thanks to love” that we become prisoners of a fetishistic act. of a growing desire culturally accepted.

but, why is love a unique formula to affirm? the role of the sexes. the antagonism in counterpoint that orchestrates the dissident and defiant conscience of rebelliousness. the “dignified” otherness that erases at the end mea culpa?

it happens that today i have no words. words drive me crazy. the histories para ti. the fire. the river. the naked bodies. the poetry. poetry that is always your name. chance. white shirts. the goodbye. the confused goodbye. the mutual goodbye without a kiss].

this is the plot of love’s development. a season inhabited by swallows. colds. truncated winter labyrinths. distance. self configuration. accept the difference until one survives in the telluric mysteries.

such is love. maker of books whose recept(o)r reedits with innumerable notes in its daily tentative attempts. in the meantime the uproars of love fill me with contradictions and a tumult of sensations.

it is time to abandon the corners of the room. what nobody knows. what nobody discovers].

Translated by Linda M. Rodríguez Guglielmoni