Perhaps surprisingly to some of his fiction fans, Roberto Bolaño touted poetry as the superior art form, able to approach an infinity in which “you become infinitely small without disappearing.” When asked, “What makes you believe you’re a better poet than a novelist?” Bolaño replied, “The poetry makes me blush less.” The sum of his life’s work in his preferred medium, The Unknown University is a showcase of Bolaño’s gift for freely crossing genres, with poems written in prose, stories in verse, and flashes of writing that can hardly be categorized. “Poetry,” he believed, “is braver than anyone.”
They radiate the audacity of the intellect, as well as the cruelty of vision, that have won their author a devoted following.
— Boston Review
Peers at the infinite through compelling, surreal and cinematic poems … beautiful.
— The Faster Times
Bolaño teeters on the brink of fantasy, but without ever detaching himself from a concrete, material world of pain and pleasure.
— Will Heyward, The Australian
It’s a book that illuminates the personal struggle behind one of the great literary careers of our times, a career that has come to define a global literary aesthetic.
— The Los Angeles Times
Bolaño was hungry, this book reminds you, for just about everything.
— Dwight Garner, The New York Times
Its most recent poems were written fifteen years after its earliest, and many of these newer ones remind us of all the reasons why Bolaño is such a fantastic writer, one of the best of our times.