Synopsis
'It all happened long time ago, no one now remembers this story
let 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.'
About the Author
Leo Boix is a Latinx bilingual poet, translator and educator born in Argentina who lives in the UK. He is a recent fellow of The Complete Works, a national mentoring programme aimed at poets from minority backgrounds, which included poets such as Kayo Chingonyi, Sarah Howe and Warsan Shire, among others. His poems have been included in many anthologies, such as Ten: Poets of the New Generation (Bloodaxe), The Best New British and Irish Poets Anthology 2019-2021 (Eyewear Publishing) and Un Nuevo Sol: British Latinx Writers (flipped eye), and have appeared in POETRY, PN Review, The Poetry Review and Modern Poetry in Translation. Boix is co-director of Invisible Presence, an Arts Council England national scheme to nurture new Latinx writers in the UK. He is a board member of Magma Poetry, co-editor of its Resistencia issue showcasing the best Latinx writing, and an advisory board member of the Poetry Translation Centre in London. He was the recipient of the Bart Wolffe Poetry Prize 2018 and the Keats-Shelley Prize 2019.
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