One Year and Three Months

For nearly three decades acclaimed Spanish poet Luis García Montero and his wife, the best-selling Spanish novelist Almudena Grandes, formed an extraordinary partnership grounded in their shared passion for literature, political activism and for each other. When Grandes died in November 2021, 15 months after being diagnosed with breast cancer, it was front page news across a shocked nation. These poems, written during his wife's illness and just after her death, narrate a journey of love and grief, but ultimately of acceptance, gratitude and hope as the poet looks back at those wrenching months with the profound realization that he would remember them "as the happiest of my life." At this moment of greatest loss, García Montero has produced some of the most powerful writing of his long career. 

In One Year and Three Months, Luis García Montero reckons with the illness and death of his wife of 30 years, Almudena Grandes, an award-winning novelist. Step by step, the poems, beautifully rendered in Katie King's masterful translations, grapple with memory and loss, and convey their struggle as a battle "in the final trenches of our hearts." While the poet maintains that "death now, I confess / and speak the truth, / is not a literary matter," it is precisely in these moving and powerful poems that García Montero gives expression to his mourning and makes it so intensely personal and intimate that readers feel and share the deep sense of loss. 

--Anthony L. Geist