Intimate Alphabet/Alfabeto íntimo
by Roberto Leni
"Careful in their concern for healing, Roberto Emilio Leni’s tonal incisions prefer insurgency. Pains are taken, pain shared, anesthesia beautifully and truthfully refused. No one is saved. Nothing remains intact. But in the exilic, anagrammatical shift from lost to found, from observation to observance, from language to language in and out of language, rare and everyday spells are quietly and militantly cast. Intimate Alphabet/Alfabeto íntimo is a wonderful anthology of scarred illumination, a magnificent gift of complex simplicity. Roberto fights for us, when he so insightfully writes for us, so we can turn round right."
Fred Moten
Poet and Professor of Performance Studies, NYU
"This poetry and solidarity trove, Intimate Alphabet/Alfabeto íntimo, opens luminous and compassionate windows to memory. Through them, we are privileged to meet clean-hearted people, those who gave their lives for justice in the world. They give us strength to continue resisting all destruction plotted by the powerful. Following the footsteps of our Eduardo Galeano, Roberto Emilio Leni gifts us these pearls of history, resilience, and contagious popular joy."
Alicia Partnoy
Writer, poet, and human rights activist
"Roberto Emilio Leni is a bit Vicente Huidobro mixed in with Nicanor Parra, but all of it an authentic passionate voice all his own. He records a Latino Chileno living and writing passionate postmodern, witty, sad, political and cool poems and stories. Intimate Alphabet/Alfabeto íntimo opens doors, like Huidobro and Parra to unique landscapes of memory and time and a Latino poet in exile who recounts both the outer and inner voyages of his life."
Alejandro Murguía
San Francisco Poet Laureate Emeritus (2012-2015)
"Just as DNA is the story we carry of our ancestors, the intimate alphabet with which Roberto Emilio Leni constructs these short stories (gestures, gestos as he prefers to call them) forms the stories of the old country, the departure from it, and the life lived away. These are American stories in the truest sense; ones in which you’ll feel the Mapuche Indigenous presence, while savoring the caló of East L.A., and life-affirming dreams of returning to the Valparaiso of your youth before death."
Adolfo Guzman-Lopez
Author California Southern: writing from the road, 1992-2025
Roberto Emilio Leni is a Chilean writer living in California since 1976, when 400 families were given political asylum in the US (the only leftist group of refugees to receive political asylum status in this country’s entire history). He holds an MA in Writing and Consciousness from the New College of California. He was awarded an artist-in-residence at the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts. His short stories have been published in Brooklyn & Boyle, Cipactli, Revolutionary Poets Brigade, Future Relations: A Resource for Radical Teaching, Zapatista Spaceship Program Zine, Contrapuntos: Desde esta orilla, escrituras urgentes, and the Altadena Poetry Review: Anthology 2026.
Rigo 23 is a visual artist, transplanted from Madeira Island, Portugal, to California in his late teens. Working across mediums and geographies, drawing remains the central tenet of his practice and methodology. He draws water from the fountain and the fountain itself, as a way to not forget the provenance of the water.