“En La única cosa importante, las voces de Amanda Hernández y Ana Portnoy Brimmer hacen equipo para enseñarnos a abrir ventanas, iluminar el paso del tiempo y que dicha luz permita, contra todo pronóstico, dar continuidad a la genealogía, sanar la herida familiar e imaginar un porvenir con frutas y flores.”
“In The Only Thing That Matters, the voices of Amanda Hernández and Ana Portnoy Brimmer team up to show us how to open windows, shed light into the passing of time, and, against all odds, bring continuity to one’s genealogy, heal the family’s burden, and imagine a fruit-bearing future filled with flowers."—Nicole Cecilia Delgado, author of adjacent islands / islas adyacentes
“This is a compelling meditation on the complexities of home and land by one of contemporary Puerto Rico’s essential poets and cultural workers. Amanda Hernández confronts us with the ‘wild animal of ourselves’ in poems that coil and unspool on the page with oceanic force and grace. Here are the love, pain, and joys of an archipelago, the stories of mothers and daughters and chosen kin, the secret languages of forgotten places and creatures. Ana Portnoy Brimmer’s elegantly musical translation beautifully renders Hernández’s poetics of unfolding as it reckons with displacement while tracing ecosystems of care.”—Urayoán Noel, author of Transversal
“La única cosa importante ha alterado las distancias entre el nombre de las cosas y el acto animal de resignificar las piezas de memoria. Versos en que las cosas se sostienen por contigüidad como las palabras abrazo mar rabia. A pesar del tiempo, asirse al nuevo yo que llama en silencio. Fácilmente Amanda pudo llevar otro nombre: Arena Fruto Parto. Pero siempre poeta.”
“The Only Thing That Matters blurred the distances between the names of things and the animal deed of reframing the fragments of memory. Verses in which things are held by their proximity, like the words, embrace sea rage. Despite the time, to grab hold of the new that calls out in silence. Amanda could easily have been called by another name: Sand Fruit Delivering. But always a poet.”—Gaddiel Francisco Ruiz Rivera, creative director of Semipermeable
“To be with these poems is to enter an island in perpetual dreaming. La única cosa importante / The Only Thing That Matters bathes us in memory, dresses us in ritual, arms us with languages beyond English, beyond colonial speech. This work is a homecoming and a discovering. Each of its chambers echoes with the vital, the truthful, the necessary.”—Shivanee Ramlochan, author of Witch Hindu
“A primera vista, parece un objeto pequeño, una pizca de sal. En el paladar, sin embargo, se va revelando la densidad que adquieren las cosas cuando por fin logramos nombrarlas. Por momentos, la voz poética parece tener lo mismo ocho que setenta años: observa, recuerda, pregunta y descubre con una lucidez que desafía el tiempo. La belleza de estos poemas está en mirar el álbum familiar a través de un espejo improbable y distante: el hallazgo en la paz que se conquista al pronunciar el vacío. La traducción de Ana Portnoy Brimmer sabe hacer nido en la pausa, como el propio poema. He aquí una poeta que entiende que la verdadera materia de la escritura no son los acontecimientos extraordinarios, sino las formas en que aprendemos a nombrar nuestra historia, a habitarla y, finalmente, a reconocer su peso.”
“Amanda Hernández’s The Only Thing That Matters is a book about writing even when nothing seems to be happening. At first glance, it appears to be a small object, a pinch of salt. Yet on the palate, however, the growing density of things begins to reveal itself once we finally manage to name them. At times, the poetic voice seems equally eight and seventy years old: observing, remembering, questioning, and discovering with a lucidity that defies time. The beauty of these poems lies in gazing at the family album through an improbable, distant mirror: their revelation in the peace won by speaking the void aloud. Ana Portnoy Brimmer’s translation knows how to build a nest atop each lull, much like the poems themselves. Here is a poet who understands that the true substance of writing lies not in extraordinary events but in the ways we learn to name our history, inhabit it, and, finally, recognize its weight.” —Mara Pastor, author of Deuda Natal
“In The Only Thing That Matters by Amanda Hernández and translated by Ana Portnoy Brimmer, we learn that other worlds were and are possible but that ‘continuing to be’ is among our most urgent charges as human beings. Using heartbreaking lists, poems as tight as haiku, the homage Hernández and Portnoy Brimmer present to us in a casual tone of ‘Let’s talk’ and explains to us that the speaker simply ‘stayed home with my things today.’ Here we are welcomed into the strangeness of just being or not being in the mother house, the neighbor’s house, the house that ‘is a girl,’ a house without doors, houses that are given away in dreams. The attention to the house becomes metaphor for the anxiety of the person living in a settler colonialist reality—one is never quite safe at home, the very house you live in is under threat.”—Tiphanie Yanique, author of Wife
“During times of social and political chaos with that insufferable noise that threatens our sanity and perspective, we’re fortunate to have the poetry of Amanda Hernández. Her soothing words, meditative, measured, and strikingly eloquent, remind us there’s an abundance of peace and beauty to be found within ourselves."—Rigoberto González, editor of Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology
“These poems showcase a sensibility that gained momentum in the wake of Hurricane Maria, which laid bare the sociopolitical and fiscal catastrophe resulting from U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico. Hernández tackles precariousness and stagnation with a subtle self-abnegation, while also affirming love and tenderness as political forces to be reckoned with."—Margarita Pintado, author of Ojo en Celo / Eye in Heat
