CENTRAL AMERICAN BOOK OF THE DEAD

Poet Balam Rodrigo's Central American Book of the Dead (Libro centroamericanode los muertos), winner of the 2018 Premio Aguascalientes, Mexico's highest poetryhonor, is a sequence of poems in multiple voices, interwoven with the author's ownnarrative, about Central American migrants and refugees, living and dead, journeyingthrough Mexico to the north. The book also interweaves altered passages from A BriefAccount of the Destruction of the Indies (1552) by Bartolomé de las Casas, a Spanishcolonist (later friar and bishop) who became the first and fiercest critic of Spanishcolonialism in the New World and the enslavement of indigenous people.The work's importance has already been well recognized in Mexico. For readersin the U.S. and the English-speaking world, it draws a compelling portrait of one of themost critical stories of our time, in poems of great formal variety and lyrical depth: themassive migration of Central Americans fleeing terror, crime, and extreme poverty, andthe persecution and danger they face in traveling through Mexico to the United States.The book is divided into five sections, for the five main countries of origin in thismigration: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Mexico itself. Each sectioncontains portraits of migrants; first-person testimonies of the dead, often titled by theprecise locations where their bodies may be found; and poems that deploy variedsources, including news stories and political and scientific reports, to give fuller context to the human tales. The beginning and end of the book, and each of its five sections, areframed by what Rodrigo calls a palimpsest: his altered passages from Bartolomé de lasCasas' classic cry of protest, situating the work within a broader Latin American story.Poems from the English translation of Libro centroamericano have appeared inAsymptote, Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets, and Poetry International.