Central American Book of the Dead - Balam Rodrigo

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