Agora is one of the most beautiful and innovative books of contemporary European poetry. In it, Ana Luísa Amaral recreates an exercise whose origin dates back to classical Greece and the beginnings of European literature: ekphrasis: the verbal representation of a visual figure. The book is made up of thirty-three artistic works and their respective descriptions in the form of a poem: a perfect alliance between image and word.

The images represent fundamental motifs of the Western imagination, such as the Annunciation, the Flood, Adam and Eve, the resurrection of Lazarus or Paradise, in a journey through the history of European art: from the Greek vases of the 3rd century BC to French Impressionism, passing through the Italian Renaissance, Flemish Baroque or English Romanticism. The poems are not a simple description of the paintings, they are the updating of the myths that have given rise to our civilization, a modern reading, illuminating aspects that we had never considered before. Amaral compares these ancient myths with moments in our current political history: migrants in the Mediterranean or in the desert in search of a promised land, the shipwreck of their boats, or the wait for a Paradise made of justice and social peace. Agora opens new paths for European poetry, but also for the understanding of our history.

«Amaral was able to see the sun in an onion and the storm in a woman with a shopping cart. Her poetry is crossed by forces that fought between the subtlety of the everyday and the transcendence of the meaning of life. A poetry of excess that was born from her own way of walking through the world.»