“Bolano wrote with the high-voltage first-person braininess of a Saul Bellow and an extreme subversive vision of his own.” –Francisco Goldman, The New York Times Magazine

Romantic Dogs

by Roberto Bolaño

Translated from Spanish by Laura Healy

Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) has caught on like a house on fire, and The Romantic Dogs, a bilingual collection of forty-four poems, offers American readers their first chance to encounter this literary phenomenon as a poet: his own first and strongest literary persona. These poems, wide-ranging in forms and length, have appeared in magazines such as Harper’s, Threepenny Review, The Believer, Boston Review, Poetry, Soft Targets, Tin House, The Nation, Circumference, A Public Space, and Conduit. Bolaño’s poetic voice is like no other’s. Publishers Weekly praised The Romantic Dogs in its review: “The Savage Detectives, the best-known novel by the Chilean-born Bolaño (1953–2003) recently found spectacular success across the English-speaking world, bringing much attention to his other work. Now comes a very competently rendered bilingual selection of his fiery, if sometimes uncontrolled, verse. Bolaño began as a poet, and some of the work here seems to have come from an extraordinarily young man: a record of stormy, untamed teen emotion—the depths of despair (‘From these nightmares I’ll retain only/ these poor houses’) or the heights of sexual adventures. Bolaño moves easily into a blend of surrealism and populism, with in-your-face gestures learned perhaps from Pablo Neruda, as when he watches ‘a trail of nurses and a trail of scorpions’ wending their ways home. Other poems are closely tied to The Savage Detectives: Bolaño’s dreamt motorcycle journey in ‘The Donkey,’ mirroring the life of the real poet Mario Santiago, will send readers back to the fictionalized portrayals of Bolaño and Santiago (Arturo and Ulises) in the novel. Bolaño the poet’s ‘deliberate immaturity/ And splendors glimpsed on another planet’ can delight: they echo his brilliant but out-of-control authorial persona, with its high-speed, self-conscious verbal play, and those echoes will be more than enough to lead fans of his prose straight to his verse."

Paperback(published Nov, 01 2008)

ISBN
9780811218016
Price US
17.95
Price CN
17
Trim Size
5x8
Page Count
128
Portrait of Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño

Twentieth-century Chilean poet and novelist