Seraphim and zombies

Through the pages of his new poetry volume, Posthuman joysAnna Pantinat unfolds a lyrical investigation that takes the founding of the Monastery of Saint Peter of Casserres as its starting point, delving into a much more ambitious exploration. The work eschews any temptation of historical fiction or recreation of the past, becoming instead an inquiry into the foundations of desire and domination. Pantinat revisits the founding narrative of a sacred space to uncover the tensions that have sustained it: blood, genealogy, faith, and the word as instruments of control. Behind silent stone walls, and amidst the wonders expressed in stories written in lowercase and History written in uppercase, a system of human relations trembles, permeated by hierarchy, predation, and the need to impose dogmas.

The book, published in a bilingual Catalan-Spanish edition by the author herself through Ultramarinos Editorial, stands as a kind of sociological map that subtly reveals how noble lineages and ecclesiastical institutions have organized the world to guarantee their survival and unwavering dominance. Through this rebellious textual operation, Anna Pantinat surgically dismantles the strategies of power, both visible and those hidden beneath the veil of devotion, and contrasts them with a voice that oscillates between irony and revelation, between punk musicality and a desperate cry demanding justice and attention. Posthuman joys It speaks not only of a bygone era, but of the persistence of the patriarchal dictatorship that still marks our bodies and discourses. The text thus becomes an archaeology of submission, a dearly liberating song that also reveals the weight of what still binds us to exploitative legacies.

Anna Pantinat's style is deliberately repetitive, cacophonous, filled with anti-songs that subvert the inherent harmony of traditional joys, a characteristic reflected in her musical compositions and her striking live performances. This formal strategy, which could be linked to the work of Carlos Hac Mor or Ester Xargay in a surge connected to David Cronenberg's concept of New Flesh, accentuates the feeling of unease, as if each repetition were a scratch on the official narrative. Language becomes living, fertile matter, a space where beauty and ruin, the sacred and the profane, clash. Within this constant tension, the poet constructs a volume that does not yearn for redemption but for critical awareness. Posthuman joys It is a liturgy and a profanation: a book that sings against the established order and, in doing so, reminds us to what extent it subjugates us at all times.