hair bundle It’s hot in the hivemind is, according to the jury, ‘a collection that could only have been written now’. The prize was awarded during the Poetry International festival in Rotterdam. Garica Diaz also won the Dutch Poetry Slam three years ago. The jury of the C. Buddingh’ Prize praises the language of her debut collection: ‘A language like the internet itself: at times psychedelic, full of memes, emoji, commercials and side paths.’ It is a collection in which anger is expressed, a anger ‘that is undisguised about oppression’.
The hivemind one enters, even more than one reads it. Garcia Diaz has skillfully created a world where the difference between analog and digital has disappeared. She writes a lot about what the blurring of that distinction means for the body, especially for the young female body. ‘it haunts my reflection’, she writes, ‘the shimmering limbs / of a being / whose only language is moaning / I arch my back and fall with her’.
Garcia Diaz interweaves such observations with quotes, often in English, which sometimes seem to have been taken from the internet (lines about Lindsay Lohan and Liz Taylor, for example) and sometimes from recent classics of cultural analysis (for example, from Donna Haraway, author of the Cyborg Manifesto, and Katherine Hayles, who writes about the posthuman body). In this way, Garcia Diaz himself has almost created a kind of post-human poetry: poems in which it is sometimes, just like in the digital space, looking for something to hold on to.
However, sometimes there is also a longing for authenticity, whatever that may be, through: “I want to dream that it is morning / and that it is morning // And that the world is not a danger / But a soft mother’s breath / and that I am not afraid / but dangerous / that I have teeth / that I can bite.’ Of It’s hot in the hivemind Maxime Garcia Diaz has done something that other poets have not done before: she wrote a collection that really shows what life in a digital age means for the body and image of growing women.
The Buddingh’ Prize, to which a monetary prize of 1,250 euros is attached, has been the most important prize for debuting poets for more than thirty years. Radna Fabias, Lieke Marsman, Tonnus Oosterhoff and Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer are among the previous laureates. The other nominated bundles this year were The firmament in between from Ferdy Karto, endless by Nisrine Mbarki and Intermediate language by Esohe Weyden.