Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Bilingual Edition. Translated from Spanish by John Oliver Simon, Patrick Madden, and Steven Stewart. Edited by Antonio Ochoa. Eduardo Milan was born in 1952 in Rivera, Uruguay, a small city that shares a street with the city of Santana do Livramento in Brazil. He lost his Brazilian mother when he was only a year-and-a-half old. As a teenager his father sent him to live in the countryside, an experience that transformed the shy boy into a confident young man. During the repressive military dictatorship of the 1970s and '80s his father was arrested for his involvement in the national resistance movement known as the Tupamaros. He was given a twenty-four-year prison sentence. The name of the prison where he was sent was Libertad (Freedom). After living in fear for several years following his father's arrest, Milan went into exile in Mexico in 1979 where he still lives, in a white house with a fig tree in the garden. From the late '80s to the early '90s he wrote a column on contemporary Latin American poetry for the journal Vuelta, which was directed by Octavio Paz. In 1997 he was awarded one of the most prestigious poetry awards in Mexico, the Aguascalientes prize, for his book of poems Alegrial. This volume is the first significant selection of his work in English.

Elsa Cross (born 1946) is one of Mexico's most significant contemporary poets, and this is the first full-length collection of her work in English - a long overdue but welcome opportunity for Anglo-American readers to get a sense of the full breadth of her work. The work selected for this volume concentrates on her longer poems, which are at the core of Elsa Cross' work - ranging from the remarkable "Bacchantes", which dates from the late '70s and early '80s and offered here in full, through "Malabar Canto" - suffused with the spirit of India - to the odes, dithyrambs and elegies of the recent Greek-inflected works. Elsa Cross' work is typified by its strong metaphysical orientation, coupled with a dazzling surface and remarkable imagery, and offers the English-speaking reader a new experience. A poetry to be savoured, thanks to the efforts of the five translators at work here, all of whom worked closely with the author to bring these poems successfully across the language barrier.