Max Rojas

Max Rojas, whose real name was Jorge Juan Máximo Rojas Proenza, was a Mexican poet, essayist, literary critic and culture manager. He was born in Mexico City on June 4, 1940, to a communist family of Oaxacan and Cuban origins. He joined the Communist Party of Mexico at the age of 18 and participated in the workers' movement for democratic unionism. He studied philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, but did not finish his degree. He worked as a librarian, editor, translator and teacher. He was also the director of the Institute of Right of Asylum-Museum House of Leon Trotsky from 1994 to 1998. Rojas wrote several books of poetry, essays and criticism, but his most ambitious and renowned work was Cuerpos, a long-winded poem of three thousand pages that he started in 1978 and continued until his death. He conceived Cuerpos as a project of 25 sections, each one corresponding to a part of the human body, but he only published six of them in four volumes. Cuerpos was a poetic exploration of the physical, historical, social and metaphysical dimensions of human existence, influenced by surrealism, Marxism, existentialism and mysticism. Rojas received the Carlos Pellicer Iberoamerican Prize in Poetry in 2009 for his work. Rojas died in Mexico City on April 24, 2015, at the age of 74. He left behind a legacy of poetic innovation, critical insight and cultural activism. He was considered one of the most original and influential voices of contemporary Mexican poetry.