In To World, poems interrogate everything: nature, society, and thought itself, with no prejudice or even principle. In other words, they don't follow any rule, tradition, or discipline; they are decidedly critical. Thought is not reduced to philosophical, ethical, religious, political, or aesthetic interpretations. Rather, we are before thought in its totality, unwilling to recognize borders - although never in a pure state, not falling into speculation, into thinking just for thinking's sake. Thought is always related to experience, both personal and collective, and above all, emotion. It never once stops being thought through image, that is to say, lyrical. This poetry speaks of poetry; it takes it all on: the objective and subjective, the real and imagined, I and other. It ventures into virgin territory, on the outskirts of romanticism, realism, symbolism, and the avant-garde. Always a model of rebelliousness and freedom, a lesson in devotion and rigor, Gelman's work places him among today's best poets.

"This magnificent selection from two decades of work by Victor Rodriguez Nunez confirms his pivotal position in international poetry. Dissolving fixed identities and formal limitations alike, the mercurial spaces of these poems reveal multiple selves, elliptical journeys and a passionate attention to everyday sensory experience. This is Cuban poetry energized by transcultural encounters, while two vital language currents of the Americas, Spanish and English, meet in Katherine Hedeen's scintillating translations. As 'rebel matter', these are poems that engage with the world in its elements - molten, fluid and restless. They invite the reader to tune in to new frequencies, not just to the sonic pleasures of language, but also to the lively matter of a universe beyond the human, its squirrels, asphalt, dust clouds and stars. Poetry's imaginative potential, Rodriguez Nunez reminds us, generates forms of dialogue that are more urgent now than ever: 'there won't be revolution / if we don't let night speak'." -Zoe Skoulding

The Art of Keeping Quiet is the first anthology in English translation by Rodolfo Alonso, one of today's most renowned Argentine poets. As early as 1956, Raul Gustavo Aguirre noted in Alonso "a surprising verbal command, where the conquests of modern poetry meld into the terrain of language, while still respecting the structure and spirit of quotidian expression." Fifty years later, Juan Gelman praised "this crystalline voice that has celebrated existence, giving its expression an essential structure like an expanding spiral. Beauty turns these poems into music; they're engraved with a formal, imaginative, and conceptual rigor that is exceptional." Alonso's poetry is, in short, a radical questioning of solipsism, an exemplary search for the other. A poetry aware of itself, its reaches and limits, always seeking to be reinvented. A poetry that serenely unites aesthetic commitment and the social vanguard.

Victor Rodriguez Nunez is one of today's most outstanding Cuban writers, although he has lived and worked outside of the island for nearly two decades, first in Nicaragua and Colombia and, since 1995, in the USA. The present collection, based on his selected poems "With a Strange Scent of World: First Anthology, 1978-1998" (Havana, 2004), offers a representative sample, as well as a rewriting, of his early poetic work.In an interview, Nunez described his search for 'a poetry that is ...participatory yet not political ...communicative yet not explicit...dialogic yet not conversational, Cuban yet not essentially nationalist...' and in her introduction to this volume, Katherine Hedeen provides us with background detail that helps to set the poet's work in context. In this first of Nunez's books to appear in English (in Katherine Hedeen's skilful translation), we see poems that are at once committed and experimental, where every limit is challenged, and where emotion and lucidity come together.

Luis Garcia Montero (Granada, 1958) is one of the most read and influential Spanish writers today. He is an essayist, fiction writer, journalist, professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Granada, and, principally, a poet. He has received numerous important honors, like the National Poetry Prize (1994) and the National Critic's Prize (2003), both in Spain, and the Poets of the Latin World Prize (2010), in Mexico. He has published eleven books of poetry, represented in The World So Often, his first anthology in English. Luis Garcia Montero's poetry has commonly been considered - even by the author himself - as realist, yet this is a misinterpretation. His poetic subject doesn't try to trap the reader in an illusory world offered up as natural, but rather to break with the automatic perception of things and facts, and so avoid catharsis. What's crucial here is the use of a language that does not try to be transparent, a simple instrument of communication, and that risks its neck to be noticed. It's a language that is both reflection and matter, and thus, has the agency to change things, the capacity to transform. Moreover, this language is not limited to the lyrical tradition, it doesn't discriminate against words in any way, it becomes democratized. By combining prosaism and tropological density, it searches for a discourse with a greater power of representation and participation. In short, Garcia Montero's work achieves a balance between sentimental rigor and intellectual outpouring, rejects solipsism, and goes deeper into dialogical poetry.

Paradise Empty brings together a wide selection of poetry from eleven collections by Hugo Mujica, one of Argentina's most renowned and respected poets. Mujica's work might be described as the poetry of thought. There is nothing superfluous in his poems - his images are crystal clear, his rhythms simple, his language precise - and their impact, in terms of both words and the silences between words, is powerful. Although his poetry is already well-known throughout South and Central America and in many European countries, Paradise Empty is the first collection of Mujica's work to be published in the UK, and in this beautifully modulated translation by Katherine M. Hedeen and the poet Victor Rodriguez Nunez, it is sure to resonate with English-language readers.

This translation offers for the first time the splendid poems of Sidney West to English readers, supposedly their original addressees. West is among the best imaginary poets of America, allegedly his native land, and of all possible lands. His texts, although rich with exceptional life experience, will satisfy those who still believe in "the death of the author." No less satisfied, in spite of his anti-romanticism, will be those captivated by "committed writing." And in another paradox that West himself would have loved, if he had existed, what's offered here constitutes a translation of a translation. An English version based on the prior version into Spanish completed in 1969 by Argentine writer Juan Gelman, one of the greatest living Latin American poets. He should be considered the genuine author of the author of these poems, and the poems themselves. Gelman's superb text poses a radical question: must human beings in modern society die in order to recuperate their human condition? Something happens after the passing of the book's thirty-five characters, their absence causes unforeseen consequences, generates certain kinds of presence. This profound questioning of Western assumptions surrounding death requires an innovative form that challenges the traditional boundaries between poetry and narrative, privileges the magical as a vital aspect of reality, and ultimately seeks a redefinition of the lyric persona. In The Poems of Sidney West, writing, without lessening its essential condition of creative practice, is conceived as an instrument not only to interpret but to transform the world.

Marco Antonio Campos's work can be considered a response to the dialogic poetry that arose in Latin America beginning in the 1950s. The latter is characterized by radical disregard for solipsism, opposition to capitalism and neo-colonialism, opening up to popular culture, democratization of language, and formal experimentation. By contrast, in Campos's poems, like in many by his contemporaries, morality is given priority over politics, feeling over reason, plain style over experimentation. In his case, a displacement from time history and biography toward space city and home is carried out, and poetry becomes chronicle. Yet this reaction is normal, intrinsic to the evolution of Latin American poetry, self-aware and adamant in its refusal to stagnate. Accordingly, Campos's work is no less conscious of the other, no less socially participative or aesthetically restless than that of his immediate predecessors. As Roger Munier suggests, in the end, each of Campos's books debates "his relentlessly questioned identity," but in a different way that ultimately continues to be dialogic and to require an active reader.

Blue Coyote with Guitar and Other Songs is the first anthology to appear in English by the renowned Mexican poet, Juan Banuelos (Tuxtla Gutierrez, Chiapas, 1932). From its beginnings to its most recent manifestations, this poetry assumes a predominantly dissident stance. In both content and form, the poet's craft is carried out against the tide of recolonization that has washed over his country since the mid-forties. Among the foremost elements of this alternative poetics is its rejection of individualism, one of the ideological pillars of modernization. Another key factor is the way it challenges the nationalism instrumental in the co-optation of the Mexican Revolution, one of the twentieth century's most radical struggles, which, in turn, constitutes a questioning of the comprador class and its exclusionary national project. Lastly, it opts for the alterity of the most marginalized social subjects in modern Mexico, the Indigenous population, whose cultures increasingly determine Banuelos's poetic vision of the world, moving beyond contemplation and seeking participation.

The first collection of the poetry of Juan Calzadilla to be translated into English, "Journal with No Subject" spans eleven books published from 1962 to the present. This poetry denounces the dehumanization of modernity, appropriates surrealistic language, questions identity and poetry itself, and dissolves the coherent, autonomous subject. Uniting political and aesthetic radicalism, Calzadilla ultimately reestablishes faith in poetry.

Garden of Silica is the first poetry anthology of the Uruguayan Ida Vitale to appear in English, spanning eight books published from 1960 to the present. Vitale is one of the fundamental voices of Latin American literature, and her work also encompasses essays, short stories, journalism, and translation. She belongs to Uruguay's Critical Generation of the 1940s, whose mission was the construction of a participative intellectual subject. Vitale's poetry illustrates the incompatibility of the construction of that intellectual subject and realism. It is not the case of an idealist aesthetic that denies the existence of objective reality or offers only a testimony of individuality. Rather, these texts seek a balance between subjectivity and objectivity, and accordingly the private and the public. In addition, with a revealing gesture of feminist undertones, intellectual capacity is privileged above that of sentimentality. As a result, Vitale's message is implicit, requiring an active reader, one involved in the very process of creation. Placing the intellectual subject at the forefront, and thus relegating the national and the feminine to a second plane, Ida Vitale's poetry offers one of the most profound and provocative representations of women's subjectivity in the Spanish language.