This landmark novella-one of the central texts of Mexican literature, is eerily relevant to our current dark times-offers a child's-eye view of a society beset by dictators, disease, and natural disasters, set in "the year of polio, foot-and-mouth disease, floods." A middle-class boy grows up in a world of children aping adults (mock wars at recess pit Arabs against Jews), where a child's left to ponder "how many evils and catastrophes we have yet to witness." When Carlos laments the cruelty and corruption, the evils of a vicious class system, his older brother answers: "So what, we are living up to our ears in shit anyway under Miguel Aleman's regime," with "the face of El Senor Presidente everywhere: incessant, private abuse." Sound familiar? Woven into this coming-of-age saga is the terribly intense love Carlos cherishes for his friend's young mother, which has the effect of driving the general cruelties further under the reader's skin. The acclaimed translator Katherine Silver has greatly revised her original translation, enlivening afresh this remarkable work.

The leading poet of his generation, Jose Emilio Pacheco is one of Mexico's most esteemed and beloved writers. City of Memory and Other Poems presents two of his finest poetry collections, accompanied by beautifully rendered translations.

The first, "City of Memory," touches on Pacheco's major literary obsessions: the destructive effects of time; the essential egotism and cruelty of the natural world, with humankind at its violent center; and the capacity of the human spirit to achieve transcendence. The second, "I watch the Earth," is an emotional catharsis, the poet's mediation on the tragic earthquake that devastated his native Mexico City in 1985. Together, these poems paint a vivid picture of the noble beauty and uncontrollable tragedy that is Mexico--and the world--today.

Jose Emilio Pacheco is the winner of the Jose Asuncion Silva Award for the best book of poetry to appear in Spanish from 1990 to 1995. Novelist, poet, essayist, and translator, he lives in Mexico City.

Cynthia Steele is the author of Politics, Gender and the Mexican Novel, 1968-1988, Beyond the Pyramid and the translator of Underground River and Other Stories by Ines Arredondo.

David Lauer is a poet and translator who lives in Chihuahua, Mexico.

Cada poema de Jose Emilio Pacheco contiene la determinacion de iluminar el lenguaje y el mundo a traves de la reflexion sobre la condicion humana. La materia, la inteligencia y la sensibilidad se nos muestra junto a la tragedia y la ironia, alejadas de la solemnidad. Es una poesia sin limites en el lenguaje, como dijo Dario Jaramillo, que extiende las fronteras de la percepcion, poesia de todos, para todos, acto compartido de descubrimiento despiadado, de cruel y explicita revelacion del inasible tiempo, de la historia cotidiana que el poeta nombra con lucidez y con el desconcierto de quien es igual a todos.

Pacheco, Battles in the Desert. Intense, despairing accounts of life in Mexico City.

Jose Emilio Pacheco's Selected Poems is the first major retrospective gathering to appear in an English-Spanish bilingual format of the work of one of Mexico's foremost writers. Born in 1939, his talent was recognized early, and while still in his twenties he was already keeping company with the great Spanish-speaking poets of Latin America. A prolific poet and a perfectionist, Pacheco has since 1962 published seven volumes of poetry, including the National Poetry Prize-winning No me preguntes como pasa el tiempo (Don't Ask Me How the Time Goes By) in 1969. Tarde o temprano, collected poems of 1958 to 1980, contains the revisions on which the translations in the present volume are based. The Selected Poems is edited by George McWhirter of The University of British Columbia, who worked closely with Pacheco himself in choosing the poems and their English translations. Besides McWhirter's own versions are those by Thomas Hoeksema, Alastair Reid, and Linda Scheer, as well as Edward Dorn and Gordon Brotherston, Katherine Silver, and Elizabeth Umlas. Affirming the poet's stature, McWhirter writes: "In his singularity of vision and multiplicity of poetic forms, traditional and modern, Jose Emilio Pacheco spans past and present in both Latin American and peninsular Spanish poetry. It is a glittering and giant technical achievement, as brilliant and instantly visible as Hart Crane's The Bridge."

Battles in the Desert & Other Stories, a collection of short fiction that deals mainly with themes of childhood and innocence betrayed, is the first book of Pacheco's fiction to appear in English. here there are no narrative arabesques, no flights of magical-realist fancy. Instead, Pacheco confronts the reader with the uglier sides of urban Mexico - its grime, its beggars, its suffocating pollution, the constricted lives of its lower middle class - all with a simplicity and directness of style impeccably shaped and clearly distilled.