Central American Book of the Dead

Angebote / Angebote:

Poet Balam Rodrigo's Central American Book of the Dead (Libro centroamericano de los muertos), winner of the 2018 Premio Aguascalientes, Mexico's highest poetry honor, is a sequence of poems in multiple voices, interwoven with the author's own narrative, about Central American migrants and refugees, living and dead, journeying through Mexico to the north. The book also interweaves altered passages from A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552) by Bartolomé de las Casas, a Spanish colonist (later friar and bishop) who became the first and fiercest critic of Spanish colonialism in the New World and the enslavement of indigenous people. The work's importance has already been well recognized in Mexico. For readers in the U.S. and the English-speaking world, it draws a compelling portrait of one of the most critical stories of our time, in poems of great formal variety and lyrical depth: the massive migration of Central Americans fleeing terror, crime, and extreme poverty, and the persecution and danger they face in traveling through Mexico to the United States. The book is divided into five sections, for the five main countries of origin in this migration: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Mexico itself. Each section contains portraits of migrants, first-person testimonies of the dead, often titled by the precise locations where their bodies may be found, and poems that deploy varied sources, including news stories and political and scientific reports, to give fuller context to the human tales. The beginning and end of the book, and each of its five sections, are framed by what Rodrigo calls a palimpsest: his altered passages from Bartolomé de las Casas' classic cry of protest, situating the work within a broader Latin American story. Poems from the English translation of Libro centroamericano have appeared in Asymptote, Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets, and Poetry International.