{"product_id":"central-american-book-of-the-dead-9781953447395","title":"Central American Book of the Dead","description":"\u003cp\u003ePoet Balam Rodrigo's Central American Book of the Dead (Libro centroamericano\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ede los muertos), winner of the 2018 Premio Aguascalientes, Mexico's highest poetry\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ehonor, is a sequence of poems in multiple voices, interwoven with the author's own\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003enarrative, about Central American migrants and refugees, living and dead, journeying\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ethrough Mexico to the north. The book also interweaves altered passages from A Brief\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAccount of the Destruction of the Indies (1552) by Bartolomé de las Casas, a Spanish\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ecolonist (later friar and bishop) who became the first and fiercest critic of Spanish\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ecolonialism in the New World and the enslavement of indigenous people.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe work's importance has already been well recognized in Mexico. For readers\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ein the U.S. and the English-speaking world, it draws a compelling portrait of one of the\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003emost critical stories of our time, in poems of great formal variety and lyrical depth: the\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003emassive migration of Central Americans fleeing terror, crime, and extreme poverty, and\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ethe persecution and danger they face in traveling through Mexico to the United States.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe book is divided into five sections, for the five main countries of origin in this\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003emigration: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Mexico itself. Each section\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003econtains portraits of migrants; first-person testimonies of the dead, often titled by the\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eprecise locations where their bodies may be found; and poems that deploy varied\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003esources, including news stories and political and scientific reports, to give fuller context \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eto the human tales. The beginning and end of the book, and each of its five sections, are\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eframed by what Rodrigo calls a palimpsest: his altered passages from Bartolomé de las\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCasas' classic cry of protest, situating the work within a broader Latin American story.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePoems from the English translation of Libro centroamericano have appeared in\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAsymptote, Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets, and Poetry International.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Flowersong Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50646341288210,"sku":"9781953447395","price":12.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_04fdf625-a973-4b3b-b273-66c2c3840ae9.jpg?v=1733174748","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/central-american-book-of-the-dead-9781953447395","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}