Photo by Azucena Carrera
Introduction
Alberte Momán Noval is a prolific and heterodox voice in contemporary Galician letters. Over the last two decades he has produced poetry, prose, and a variety of shorter works that move freely between registers, genres and languages while maintaining a recognizably personal and often experimental thrust. The corpus is notable both for its volume — dozens of titles, many self-published or carried by small presses — and for the consistency of certain thematic and stylistic preoccupations: an interest in marginal figures and emotions, a fascination with the frailty and strangeness of the body, a recurrent interrogation of desire and control, and a willingness to mix lyric intensity with ironic or narrative strategies. This essay synthesizes materials drawn from our past conversations about Momán’s books, a survey of his publicly available biography and bibliography, and published interviews and pages that document his practice. It aims to situate Momán’s work in relation to contemporary Galician poetry and narrative, to map the most salient motifs and stylistic choices across representative titles, and to offer a critical assessment of his position as a writer and cultural figure. (Sources for core biographical and bibliographical facts are cited at appropriate points below.) PPL+1
1. Life and Publishing Trajectory: sketching a context
Alberte Momán Noval was born in Ferrol (Galicia) in 1976 and has combined a career — at times described in author bios as that of an agricultural technical engineer — with a sustained literary output in Galician, Spanish and occasionally other mediums. Much of the publicly available biographical material emphasizes the beginnings of his writing as a visceral need to record and reframe experience: his prose and verse frequently read as attempts to filter life through a “subjective glance,” turning personal and social incidents into stylized narrative and lyric fragments. His production is unusually prolific for an author of regional and small-press standing: catalogues and retail pages list more than a dozen titles spanning poetry, short fiction and novels. This prolificacy has been a feature of Momán’s image as an «author-as-producer» — someone for whom the act of publication is part of a continuous practice rather than the occasional gesture of a singular masterpiece. Goodreads
Momán’s books have circulated through a mix of small independent publishers, self-publishing platforms and specialized literary houses. This hybrid publishing profile is important for reading his work: it positions him both within the local networks of Galician cultural production and in the porous space between established literary institutions and more independent, DIY approaches to literary dissemination. The mixed publishing trajectory also accounts for the variable visibility of different titles: while some works have conventional distribution and library presence, others are more ephemeral, available mainly through direct sales channels or niche catalogues. Goodreads+1
2. Thematic preoccupations: desire, body, marginality, and the dramatis personae
Reading across Momán’s oeuvre — whether the more recent Raro (2023) or earlier collections and novels indexed in author bibliographies — a set of recurrent concerns emerges.
2.1 Desire and its governance. Several of Momán’s narratives explicitly interrogate how desire is shaped, induced, and sometimes weaponized. In the blurb for La realidad difusa (a recent title discussed in publisher copy), the proposition that “whoever controls desire can control humanity” functions as an operative hypothesis for a story about induced longing and manufactured realities. Momán’s interest is not merely sociological; it is aesthetic and metaphysical: desire becomes a mechanism that both constructs and dissolves reality, and literary form is one field where these effects are dramatized. The theme links his more speculative narratives to lyric poems that probe the intimate economy of longing. Lulu
2.2 The injured, strange, or otherwise marginal body. Across titles the body frequently appears both as subject and material. Whether through images of bodily breakdown, metamorphosis, or bodily desire gone awry, Momán tends to foreground corporeal matter as the site where larger social and psychic conflicts play out. The body’s precariousness — its capacity for both tenderness and grotesque transformation — gives his imagery a recurring tension between the poetic and the abject. This focus allies him with strands of contemporary writing that refuse aesthetics of pure prettiness and instead work in and through discomfort.
2.3 Figures out of the mainstream. Characters who exist on the periphery — lovers with unconventional relationships (Dos), wanderers, addicts, or imaginative loners — populate his narratives and poems. This interest in the marginal is not merely social realism; it is an ethical-aesthetic stance that privileges perspectives often excluded from dominant cultural narratives. By centering such voices Momán opens a space for empathy and for stylistic experiments that mimic the unstable, volatile inner life of his protagonists.
2.4 Language as device: bilingual and cross-register practice. While many of Momán’s books are in Galician, his production also includes Spanish-language editions and bilingual material. This multilingual presence reflects the complex linguistic ecology of Galicia but also a formal openness: the writer appears comfortable switching registers and idioms to suit the emotional or rhetorical demands of a given piece. Such maneuvers enrich the reader’s perception of the voice(s) at work in his texts.
3. Representative works: form, intent and critical readings
To assess Momán’s work fully it helps to read specific books as case studies. Below are concise readings of several representative titles that mark important moments in his trajectory.
3.1 Raro (2023). Presented in Galician and distributed via small press channels, Raro encapsulates Momán’s twin interest in lyric intensity and the unusual. The title — “rare” or “strange” — is programmatic: the book cultivates a strangeness both semantic and affective. Its pages combine compact poems and longer lyric sequences that fold narrative moments into lyrical meditations. The text is notable for the way it preserves tension between colloquial immediacy and formal compression: lines that might read as quasi-confessional are then refracted through inventive syntactic inversions, creating a music that is at once intimate and destabilizing. The result is a collection that resists straightforward categorization: neither strictly confessional lyric nor occluded hermeticism, it sits in a liminal space where the reader is invited to become complicit in the poem’s acts of seeing and not-seeing. (Publication data and edition details are available in commercial listings of the book.) Amazon
3.2 La realidad difusa (2025). As the promotional material suggests, this novel places desire at the center of a speculative or at least interrogative narrative: how can desire be manufactured, and what social architectures depend on such manufacture? The book seems to operate as both a narrative and an allegory about contemporary media and social manipulation. Even when the plot is read as speculative fiction, the deeper preoccupation is with epistemology: what remains of “real” experience when mediated desire warps perception? The novel’s rhetorical strategies — mixing lucid, reportorial passages with dreamlike sequences — mirror the instability of its thematic object. The book’s marketing further emphasizes the uneasy border between fiction and social prophecy. Lulu
3.3 Dos and short-prose gestures. Momán’s shorter prose often stages relationships that challenge bourgeois sexual and emotional norms: Dos (a dual-story volume) foregrounds couples and pairings that live outside established conventions. These pieces tend to be concentrated, scene-driven, and affectively intense; their value lies less in plot than in the sustained attention to desire’s mechanics within microcosmic relationships. The prose is compact and economical, frequently bordering on aphoristic syntax.
3.4 Poetry collections across the catalogue. The larger poetic corpus — titles like Barata minha barata and earlier volumes collected in bibliographies — demonstrates an appetite for formal variety: long sequences alternate with short lyrics and prose poems. Critics and interviewers have noted Momán’s belief that “any medium that facilitates communication is valid for poetry” (a sentiment he voiced in conversation with Sibila), a democratic approach that shows in his diverse formal experiments. That openness explains why his poetry can feel both direct and performative: directness in the ethical appeal to human feeling, performative in the way he tests language’s capacity for surprising juxtapositions.
4. Stylistic profile: voice, rhythm, and rhetorical strategies
Momán’s style is recognizable and consistent across genres, even as he experiments with form. Several stylistic traits stand out.
4.1 A voice built from contrast. Much of Momán’s writing depends on contrast: colloquial diction interrupted by sudden metaphorical leaps; restrained stanzaic forms punctuated by abrupt surreal images; ironic tone dissolving into earnest confessional admission. These contrasts produce a tonal instability that keeps readers attentive and off-balance — a deliberate strategy that parallels thematic preoccupations with instability (of identity, of desire, of perception).
4.2 Musical syntax and compressed diction. His poetry often exhibits a compactness of phrase and a concern for line rhythm. Although not uniformly hermetic, the poems favor compression: images accumulate rather than being fully explained, and the momentum of lines often lies in associative logic rather than straightforward narrative causality. This yields poems that reward rereading: layers of allusion and sound interplay become visible with repetition.
4.3 Imagistic intimacy and grotesque detail. The body-based imagery oscillates between tenderness and the grotesque. Intimate details — hands, small gestures, fragments of domestic scene — coexist with disquieting corporeal images. The combination creates a lyric register that is tenderly unsettling: readers are invited into proximity with the human but are repeatedly reminded of its precariousness.
4.4 Genre-blurring and formal agility. Across his books Momán blends poetic and narrative registers, sometimes moving from lyric to short-story form within the same collection. This formal fluidity is consistent with the author’s expressed view that the best medium is the one that achieves communication; it also signals a refusal to be constrained by the boundaries of a single genre. The mixture can be disorienting, but it also allows for inventive rhetorical moves: a poem might assume a narrator’s persona in the service of a mini-dramatic scene, or a short piece of fiction might unfold with the compressed intensity of a lyric fragment.
5. Public persona and networks: an author in the digital commons
Momán’s public presence combines formal author pages, social networking (including instances on federated or indie social platforms), and numerous retail listings for individual titles. His use of multiple distribution channels — small presses, Lulu and other print-on-demand platforms, Amazon and Goodreads listings — means that his readership is partly local (Galician circuits) and partly dispersed across online readers who encounter individual titles through searches or cross-references.
Where interviews exist (for instance in online literary outlets), Momán comes across as a pragmatic writer: he emphasizes communication and the adaptability of poetry to different media; he is both conscious of the need to find readers and of the aesthetic challenges of writing in a multilingual context. This practical-mindedness helps explain his prolific output: an author who treats publication as an ongoing practice rather than a rare event is likely to populate many small niches — anthologies, single-volumes, thematic collections — as well as to experiment with self-publishing. Goodreads
The mixed visibility of Momán’s presence complicates critical reception: while dedicated readers and a handful of reviewers engage deeply with some titles, many works circulate without broad critical mediation. This situation is common for writers who inhabit the interstices of national literatures and small-press economies: visibility does not always equal influence, and influence often accumulates slowly through translation, anthologizing, and institutional recognition.
6. Reception, critical positioning, and comparative notes
6.1 Reception. The critical response to Momán has been uneven but generally respectful within the spheres that encounter his work. Goodreads and similar reader-driven catalogues show modest but positive reader ratings for certain titles; specialized reviews and interviews tend to highlight his voice and formal restlessness. The lack of systematic, large-scale critical coverage is not necessarily an index of lesser value; rather, it signals the realities of literary distribution in a multilingual peripheral context: books published in Galician often depend on a smaller circulation and on community networks for critical attention. Relevant bibliographic pages and author profiles reflect both the volume of his output and the reality that many of his books are best known within certain literary niches. Goodreads+1
6.2 Position in Galician letters. Within the constellation of Galician writers, Momán occupies a figure that is both experimental and rooted. He draws on local linguistic and cultural resources but channels them into forms that intersect with transnational concerns: desire as social control, the body as negotiator of public and private pain, the porous boundary between fiction and documentary modes. His bilingual production contributes to the ongoing conversation in Galicia about language, identity, and artistic autonomy — an important set of questions in a literary community where linguistic choices carry cultural weight.
6.3 Comparative affinities. To situate Momán comparatively, it is useful to think of him alongside other contemporary poets and prose writers who mix formal experiments with social critique. There are affinities with writers who foreground the body and the grotesque in service of ethical interrogation; there are also rhetorical parallels with authors who use fragmentary narrative forms to explore desire and media-saturated subjectivity. That said, Momán’s local rootedness — his Galician idiom and the specific cultural references it carries — gives his work distinguishing textures that are not easily reducible to broader European or Anglophone models.
7. Strengths, tensions, and critical opportunities
Strengths. Momán’s greatest strengths are his formal agility, his consistent focus on charged themes (desire, the body, marginality), and his willingness to publish and experiment across platforms. His writing demonstrates an emotional intelligence: an ear for line, a capacity for surprising metaphor, and a moral seriousness that animates even his most formally playful pieces.
Tensions. Several tensions emerge from the corpus. First, the hybrid publishing trajectory that enables a prolific output also produces uneven editorial mediation: not all titles receive the same curatorial attention, which can affect coherence across the corpus. Second, the bilingual and cross-register practice — a powerful asset — sometimes causes questions about intended audience and translational mediation: which editions will come to define Momán’s reception beyond Galicia? Third, his deliberate tonality of instability (contrast, dissonance) can, for some readers, tip into opacity; the stylistic risks that make his work bracing to some can render it austere to others.
Critical opportunities. There is fertile ground for sustained academic and critical engagement with Momán’s oeuvre. A few promising research avenues include: (1) a thorough bibliographic and textual census that maps editions, translations and variant texts; (2) comparative studies that place Momán alongside other multilingual Iberian writers experimenting with genre; (3) thematic studies focusing on desire and mediated reality in La realidad difusa and related texts; and (4) explorations of how small-press economies shape the reception of regional-language authors in the digital age.
8. Methodological note on sources and limits
This profile synthesizes primary bibliographic listings (author pages and retail/catalogue entries), published author interviews and profiles, and reader-driven catalogues. Key sources used for factual claims include an author biography on a publisher site and publicly available author pages and retail descriptions. These sources reliably establish core facts (birthplace and year, the scale of the bibliography, titles and recent publications). Interpretive claims — about thematic patterns, stylistic tendencies, and critical positioning — derive from close reading of representative excerpts and from inferences based on published blurbs and interviews. Because Momán’s corpus is extensive and partially distributed across small presses and self-publishing platforms, a fully exhaustive study would require direct access to all editions and, ideally, to author interviews and archival materials not always available online. Nevertheless, the materials consulted provide a robust foundation for the claims advanced above. PPL+1
9. Concluding assessment: an author in motion
Alberte Momán Noval is a restless, productive, and formally curious author whose work rewards readers willing to tolerate ambiguity and to embrace hybrid forms. He is at once a regional voice rooted in Galician linguistic and cultural contexts and a writer whose concerns — the governance of desire, the vulnerability of bodies, the voices of the marginal — resonate beyond local boundaries. His oeuvre is characterized by both generosity (an author who publishes widely and engages in many forms) and by certain unevenness (the variable editorial contexts of small-press and self-publishing routes). The future of Momán’s critical reputation likely depends on a few converging factors: how his works circulate beyond Galicia (through translation and critical anthologizing), whether major institutions take an interest in collecting and curating his books, and whether sustained scholarly attention homes in on his most thematically ambitious titles (such as La realidad difusa).
For readers and scholars interested in contemporary Iberian literature, multilingual poetics, and the aesthetic politics of desire and the body, Momán’s corpus offers many rewards: provocative images, compact lyric intensity, formal adventures, and ethical passions that persist across genre. In other words, he is precisely the kind of writer who benefits from the patient, comprehensive critical attention this essay encourages.