The Poet Whose Sapphic Verses Are Going Viral on BookTok

There’s a poem by Inés Aguilar that starts with the line “you lit a cigarette and I forgot what century it was” and ends three stanzas later with something that makes you put your phone face-down and just sit with it for a minute. If you’ve seen it on BookTok, you know. If you haven’t, it’s coming for you.

Inés, 26, is a poet based in Madrid, writing primarily in Spanish with self-translated English versions that she posts on her own. She has been writing since she was a teenager. She has been this kind of writing for about three years, since she let herself stop coding her subjects as ambiguous and started writing plainly about women.

The Writing Life

Inés works part-time as a bookseller at an independent shop in Malasaña, the neighbourhood that has been Madrid’s queer heart for decades. She writes in the morning, before the shop opens. Two hours minimum, phone in another room, notebook and pen only for the first draft.

“The phone edits you as you write,” she says. “I don’t want to be edited until I’m finished.”

She has filled 34 notebooks. She does not go back and read them. They’re not for reading, she says. They’re for getting it out.

Finding Her Voice

For years, Inés wrote around her subjects. Pronouns kept vague. Settings kept neutral. She thought she was being literary. Looking back, she thinks she was being scared.

The change happened after she read a collection by a contemporary Spanish poet writing explicitly about queer desire with zero apology. “I put the book down and thought, she’s allowed to just say it,” Inés recalls. “And then I thought, oh, so am I.”

The first poem she wrote after that, she posted online without thinking too hard. It got 40,000 views in a week. She hasn’t looked back.

BookTok and What It Does

Inés is thoughtful about BookTok. She appreciates the reach. She worries about the speed.

“Poetry is supposed to stay with you,” she says. “The scroll is the enemy of that. But if the scroll brings someone to the poem and then they stop scrolling for a moment, then it worked.”

She posts two or three poems a week. Each one includes a short voice note of her reading it aloud, which she finds matters enormously. “Hearing a poem is different from reading it. I want people to hear what I hear.”

What She’s Working On

Inés has a full collection in progress, titled Lo Que No Nombré (What I Did Not Name), which she describes as a love letter to the years she spent writing around herself. She is in conversation with two small independent publishers and is not in a hurry.

“I want it to be right,” she says. “I spent years not saying things clearly. This book is going to say everything.”

She is also running a small online poetry workshop for queer writers in Spanish-speaking communities, free to attend, no experience required. Thirty-two people signed up in the first 48 hours.

“The need is there,” she says. “People want to find the words. I just want to help.”

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