The Mexican Night is the first of several travel journals, to be published over the next few years, which Ferlinghetti originally envisioned under the title of “Writing Across the Landscape." It is considerably more than a travel book, including as it does much pure prose-poetry, new poems, and drawings taken from the author’s notebooks. The Mexican Night is not only personal but political, while at times it would seem to be a kind of “travel novel”––with but one character––the wandering figure (somehow surrounded with solitude) of the poet himself.