Southernmost: Sonnets
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Summary
'It all happened long time ago, no one now remembers this story
let me tell you how it all happened, how once we turned unholy.'
In Southernmost, Leo Boix takes us on a spellbinding voyage through time and imagination, from the Argentina of his birth – ‘the end of the world, the antipode’ – to a new life in England.
Unearthing an old grief, the poet embarks on a glittering, encyclopaedic exploration of the Latin America he left behind: a journey through personal memory into a continent’s past, haunted by the Europeans who once fixed their telescopes on its shores. Helping us ‘see faces history can’t reach’, Southernmost reveals truths hidden in plain sight: the devastation of indigenous peoples and their lands; dissidents disappeared by the junta; a mother’s concealed cancer diagnosis; the clarifying sexuality of a boy whose father can’t bear to acknowledge it.
Restlessly intelligent, tender in their evocation of gay intimacy, migration, and the natural world, this virtuosic net of sonnets captures a glimpse of our world’s interconnecting threads.
'And I realised I couldn’t go on travelling – I had to stop my tour;
that there was no El Dorado; their vast skies were also ours.
Years later, in another country, I was also an interpreter
who tried to render things from one world to another.
When I finally wake up I’m always at a loss. Where am I?
I’m back home, of course. Still, outside, the strangest sky.'
let me tell you how it all happened, how once we turned unholy.'
In Southernmost, Leo Boix takes us on a spellbinding voyage through time and imagination, from the Argentina of his birth – ‘the end of the world, the antipode’ – to a new life in England.
Unearthing an old grief, the poet embarks on a glittering, encyclopaedic exploration of the Latin America he left behind: a journey through personal memory into a continent’s past, haunted by the Europeans who once fixed their telescopes on its shores. Helping us ‘see faces history can’t reach’, Southernmost reveals truths hidden in plain sight: the devastation of indigenous peoples and their lands; dissidents disappeared by the junta; a mother’s concealed cancer diagnosis; the clarifying sexuality of a boy whose father can’t bear to acknowledge it.
Restlessly intelligent, tender in their evocation of gay intimacy, migration, and the natural world, this virtuosic net of sonnets captures a glimpse of our world’s interconnecting threads.
'And I realised I couldn’t go on travelling – I had to stop my tour;
that there was no El Dorado; their vast skies were also ours.
Years later, in another country, I was also an interpreter
who tried to render things from one world to another.
When I finally wake up I’m always at a loss. Where am I?
I’m back home, of course. Still, outside, the strangest sky.'
