“Thresholds of fire”: memory as a territory of fissures, ashes and transformation

The writer Julieta Strasberg presents “Thresholds of Fire”. This book brings together stories, stories and poetic prose. All the works are crossed by the same question: what remains of us in that which burns, breaks or disappears?

Published by Getting closer Editionsthe volume proposes a unique reading experience. The work crosses memory, language, body and territory. His writing is fragmentary and sensory.

The book is organized into three main cores. “Ancestral”, “Chronofracta” and “Absentario” They function as symbolic stations. In them, time, emotional inheritance, childhood, grief and transformation dialogue with each other.

Far from a linear narrative, “Thresholds of Fire” is constructed as a constellation of texts. The author wrote them over almost ten years. Old houses, damp neighborhoods, lucid dreams and spectral figures populate its pages. Familiar objects and characters affected by loss also appear. Everything makes up a universe where the everyday and the ominous coexist permanently.

An emotional presentation at the Book Fair

The book was presented last April 26 at 6 p.m.. The event took place at Approaching Editions stand. It was located in the Blue Pavilion, stand 337of the Buenos Aires International Book Fair. A busy audience accompanied the presentation.

Gabriela Stoppelman participated in the event. There, the author defined her book as “an invitation to cross thresholds.” These thresholds are transit spaces. They connect memory with forgetting, presence with absence, silence with language.

This idea appears condensed in the opening text of the volume:

«There are words that are born from fire and others that are written in ashes. In this book, each story is a threshold: a crossing between memory and oblivion, between absence and presence, between silence and the voice that insists on naming the impossible.»

Prologue, back cover and epilogue: three voices in dialogue

The prologue is titled “Time treats”. It was written by Gabriela Stoppelman. In it, the book is read as an exploration of the folds of time and inherited wounds.

Stoppelman highlights the power of neologisms. It also points out the presence of the wound as a poetic nucleus. It underlines the book’s ability to inhabit transition zones. “The neologism is always a rebellion at the heart of the alphabet and semantics,” he says. Furthermore, he describes Strasberg’s writing as a movement “in the power of the fragile, the vulnerable, the nourished by wounds.”

The back cover belongs to Mariela Asensio. She defines the work as “a territory of transit.” In that territory, writing operates on the edge. Separate what is remembered from what fades. Each story articulates, according to its reading, “a poetics of the fissure.” The experience appears as a lit fragment and the rest that insists.

He epilogue is titled “The tiger’s suspigram”. Its author is María Verónica Pérez Lambrecht. She deepens the affective and symbolic dimension of the book. It uses images linked to childhood, the body and memory.

In the epilogue the idea of «dermogram» : a secret writing that emerges on the skin as an inherited spell. It also introduces the notion of “injuries” : wounds transmitted between generations. These wounds persist in the body and in language.

Pérez Lambrecht was present at the presentation. He read part of some stories. She also shared the particular glossary of neologisms created by the author.

A multidisciplinary writer

Julieta Strasberg She is a writer, lawyer, teacher, mediator, painter and cultural manager. His work is crossed by multiple intersections. There literature, memory, the body and the city converge.

In “Thresholds of Fire”, these lines come together in a singular writing. The author transforms fragility and loss into poetic matter. Rather than offering closed answers, the book proposes going through uncertain areas. It invites you to inhabit the fissures. From there, a form of light can still emerge.