HOSPITAL NIGHTS

Hospital Nights is a poetic diary about the trials of life in illness. It is the need to name the processes that a sick body must follow, a heart wounded from so much beating. The illness itself is not glorified, but rather the search for a remedy, the path towards health. Daily life in the hospital, the days, in their daily hustle and bustle, the comings and goings of the sick and doctors, patients and caregivers, but above all the nights, where pain lurks in the darkness, and uncertainty accompanies it.

Composed of four sections that indicate the path this heart must follow, from treatment to convalescence, Mariana Torres Ruiz discovers new words and creates her own dictionary, sometimes scientific, other times domestic, and renames 'unease' and 'anguish' with names of medications and therapies. Then, hope in doses of 20 mg. Although the author questions where to place this universe of words, the doubt is resolved in her verses, in the poems that, with moderation and a serious but not dramatic tone, unfold like calendar pages, one by one, with the precise pause of a time that is observed, from within and from without, so that fear does not dominate.

In the lengthy poem, intimacy is present, the secrecy so that no one is terrified, to cry in silence, so that María doesn't notice the red eyes. In each section, "Treatment," "Ward 300," "Hospital Nights," and "Convalescence," the poet invites her muses to accompany her: Dolores Castro, Wislawa Szymborska, Alejandra Pizarnik, Sylvia Plath, and concludes with Emily Dickinson, companions on a poetic journey, mapped out by the contours of this literary tradition.

In Hospital Nights, the poetic lines occupy the space they need: to the left, to the right sometimes, at the center, they become disoriented, seeking their balance. Thinned poetic lines, sometimes in a single word. Lines that drip, that sometimes turn into a cocktail list to stay alive. Instead, in the end, the words group together until they seem like poetic clauses, verses, prose poems. "We need to be together," the words say, the poetic self says to her interlocutor.
"Hospital Nights" is a murmur, a delicate conversation. It is an incantation against emptiness. So, is the poem a conversation or a monologue? It is both because in it is the past, the present, and the future through memory, through being here and now listening to the beat of the night.