The margins become testimony, memory and collective voice.
BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA
Argentine poet and songwriter Adolfo Marino “Bebe” Ponti has published Un caballo dentro de la lluvia, his sixth collection of poetry and one of his most explicitly social works. The volume confronts urban marginalization, hunger, loneliness, ecological destruction and the experience of living without secure belonging. Rather than observing those realities from a distance, Ponti builds a poetic voice that moves alongside the people and territories it describes. The book will be presented at Salón Marabú in Buenos Aires with free admission and a musical performance by the Minondi Furno duo.
Published by Funga Editorial under the curatorship of poet and editor Andrés Torres Acuña, the collection is organized into four sections. En la calle examines the human remains of metropolitan life, while Tierra desolada moves through environments threatened by fires and abandonment, including Iberá and the Amazon. Alguien se comerá la voz and Variaciones turn toward language itself, questioning whether words can still represent suffering without transforming it into spectacle. The title’s image of a horse advancing through the rain becomes a symbol of persistence inside an environment stripped of certainty.
Ponti initially hesitated to publish the collection because he considered its vision excessively pessimistic and exposed to the harshness of the street. He eventually concluded that poetry could locate beauty without denying cruelty, allowing language to emerge from places where conventional ideas of paradise have disappeared. That decision shapes a book grounded in social commitment but resistant to political slogans. Its strength comes from converting individual observation into a broader collective voice.
Born in Quimilí, Santiago del Estero, in 1957, Ponti has worked across poetry, narrative, journalism, cultural research and popular song. His lyrics have been recorded by prominent figures in Argentine music, while his books have maintained a close relationship with the landscapes and oral traditions of his province. In the prologue, critic Claudio LoMenzo places him within a literary lineage associated with Raúl González Tuñón, Enrique Santos Discépolo and Juan Gelman. Un caballo dentro de la lluvia continues that tradition by treating poetry not as retreat, but as a form of attention toward lives and environments frequently excluded from public memory.
Culture preserves what power prefers to overlook. / La cultura preserva lo que el poder prefiere ignorar.