Böcker av Leo Boix

'It all happened long time ago, no one now remembers this storylet me tell you how it all happened, how once we turned unholy.'In Southernmost, Leo Boix takes us on a spellbinding voyage through time and imagination, from the Argentina of his birth - 'the end of the world, the antipode' - to a new life in England.Unearthing an old grief, the poet embarks on a glittering, encyclopaedic exploration of the Latin America he left behind: a journey through personal memory into a continent's past, haunted by the Europeans who once fixed their telescopes on its shores. Helping us 'see faces history can't reach', Southernmost reveals truths hidden in plain sight: the devastation of indigenous peoples and their lands; dissidents disappeared by the junta; a mother's concealed cancer diagnosis; the clarifying sexuality of a boy whose father can't bear to acknowledge it.Restlessly intelligent, tender in their evocation of gay intimacy, migration, and the natural world, this virtuosic net of sonnets captures a glimpse of our world's interconnecting threads.'And I realised I couldn't go on travelling - I had to stop my tour;that there was no El Dorado; their vast skies were also ours.Years later, in another country, I was also an interpreter who tried to render things from one world to another.When I finally wake up I'm always at a loss. Where am I?I'm back home, of course. Still, outside, the strangest sky.'

'It isn't often that one encounters a sensibility so interested in our world - and so compelling in its powers of attentiveness. Leo Boix's poetry has a wide tilt and scope. It sings the doors open' Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic'They are sailors from another century, stalwart / captured on daguerrotype, casually masculine, tender of heart.'In the middle of the last century, the SS General Pueyrredón from Buenos Aires deposits Leo Boix's paternal grandfather on English soil for the first time. In the two years he spends there, he acquires a taste for his new homeland: from taking his tea white - muy blanco - to plunging into unfamiliar sensual worlds.So begins the poet's own journey, arriving in the United Kingdom as a young queer man. Ballad of a Happy Immigrant tells of the life he makes there: a dazzling collection of what it means to live, love and write between two cultures and traditions. Effortlessly moving between the English imagination and Spanish language, it is a boundless exploration of otherness and home, and the personal transformation that follows between 'loss / and a life / that starts anew.'*A Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice*