Primeiro espello ventures even further along the paths that Olalla Cociña had already made her own a decade earlier in Vestir a noite, which until now was her most recent book of poems: the powerful, somewhat bitter gleams of those moments of memory that, once attained, dazzle with their intensity; unexpected logics that reveal themselves as evident once they have been expressed.

Olalla Cociña’s book belongs to the realm of oneiric literature without limiting itself to transcribing the dislocated perception of dreams or their deceptive contours; instead, it seeks to illuminate the strangeness of those crystals with a different light by incorporating them into the poem. These are texts that always weigh far less than the impression they leave behind; they privilege that kind of sensation that expands, that grows from within, and that is precisely greater because it is never fully exposed.

As Ildefonso Rodríguez notes in the preface to the poems, Olalla Cociña is a writer who suspends boundaries, shifts meanings, and moves toward the unstable and the in-between. “Not even in sleep can we cease to be who we are,” one of the lines observes; yet in her writing, Cociña also continuously doubles herself, hovers above herself, observes herself from the ceiling of the room while she sleeps. Strange camera angles, an intuition that strains so as not to become too familiar, so as not to be detached from the effort that self-recognition requires.