“Harms” and the Citizen: Poetry and Politics in Erín Moure’s <i>O Cidadán</i>

In her landmark book of poems, O Cidadán (2002), Erín Moure claims that what define the citizen are gestures of border-crossing hospitality, not attestations of political belonging. She embodies her vision in poems that transgress the borders of syntactic structures, semantic fields, and linear organization of verbal and visual marks on the page. That creative and ethically responsible political and poetic enactments are analogically related and mutually reinforcing is an attractive proposal, but one complicated by the presence of “catalogues of harms” in the book. What is the connection between these “harms” and the “harmonic splendor” the poet also evokes? Are these antithetical, or, as the echo in the words provocatively suggests, what Moure calls “interresonant” realities? This essay seeks to discern and assess the poet’s answer to this question by analyzing the convergent and conflicting connotations of various key words in the book, including the Galician term chosen for its title; by situating O Cidadán in relation to Moure’s earlier work, in which the citizen is an object of scorn; and finally by interrogating Moure’s use of the Deleuzian idea of the fold as metaphysical support for her poetics.