Let's buy a poet

Author's name: Alfonso Croshdar Publisher: Maskelyani Year of publication: 2017 Literary classification: Novel Brief about the book: How to present, literarily, a society besieged within a financial space where material values rise above everything to become the essence of human relationships? A burning question answered by the Portuguese novelist Alfonso Croshdar with a humorous suggestion consisting of buying poets as one buys any other commodity from stores. A 12-year-old teenage girl asked her parents to buy a poet, like other families that find in animals (cats and dogs...) affection in homes, firstly because it does not cost much financially, and secondly because it does not leave dirt like painters and sculptors. With this idea, which seems to us sarcastic and strange, the author exposes an entire society, a society that measures people by numbers and scales, and defines human relationships by their usefulness, and everything outside that system is invalid. Is there a place for poets in such a society? Has the era of poetry ended, and is it time to bid farewell to the poem to preserve its humanity and recover what has been displaced under many names: modernity, progress, efficiency, profit...? That is what this novel aims to answer.