Central American Book of the Dead - by Balam Rodrigo (Paperback)

About the Book

Central American Book of the Dead is a sequence of poems in multiple voices, interwoven with the author's own narrative, about Central American migrants and refugees, living and dead, journeying through Mexico to the north.

Book Synopsis

Poet Balam Rodrigo's Central American Book of the Dead (Libro centroamericano

de los muertos), winner of the 2018 Premio Aguascalientes, Mexico's highest poetry

honor, is a sequence of poems in multiple voices, interwoven with the author's own

narrative, about Central American migrants and refugees, living and dead, journeying

through Mexico to the north. The book also interweaves altered passages from A Brief

Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552) by Bartolomé de las Casas, a Spanish

colonist (later friar and bishop) who became the first and fiercest critic of Spanish

colonialism in the New World and the enslavement of indigenous people.

The work's importance has already been well recognized in Mexico. For readers

in the U.S. and the English-speaking world, it draws a compelling portrait of one of the

most critical stories of our time, in poems of great formal variety and lyrical depth: the

massive migration of Central Americans fleeing terror, crime, and extreme poverty, and

the 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 this

migration: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Mexico itself. Each section

contains portraits of migrants; first-person testimonies of the dead, often titled by the

precise locations where their bodies may be found; and poems that deploy varied

sources, 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, are

framed by what Rodrigo calls a palimpsest: his altered passages from Bartolomé de las

Casas' classic cry of protest, situating the work within a broader Latin American story.

Poems from the English translation of Libro centroamericano have appeared in

Asymptote, Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets, and Poetry International.

Review Quotes

"[N]ewly born from death," these voices, these bodies,

refuse to vanish from the face of the earth. Fiercely lyrical,

burning with fury, these immigrants now live eternally in the

world, in us. Each voice is haunting, inerasable. Collectively, the

voices crash through false propagandas, rewrite what we call

history. Dan Bellm's translations are as intimate as whispered

conversations around a kitchen table. Balam Rodrigo's poetic

gifts are mind-blowing-I'm so thankful for his voice, which in

this singular book, ignites into a blazing chorus.

-Eduardo C. Corral, author of Slow Lightning and

Guillotine

In Dan Bellm's meticulous rendering of Balam Rodrigo's

Central American Book of the Dead, the voices of the dead speak in

heartbreaking detail of the atrocities committed against them in

Mexico as they tried to reach the United States. But they also tell

of their dreams, their loves, their yearnings for the homelands

they've left behind. Each poem testifies not only to the

complicity of governments in the conditions that force migrants

to leave their homes, but also to the brutal colonial origins of the

violence they face in their journey to a better life. More than

testimony, each poem is a burial rite, Rodrigo's restoration of the

humanity of those murdered and abandoned. This book will

haunt you, as well it should.

-Rosa Alcalá, author of MyOTHER TONGUE

Balam Rodrigo transports readers across literary borders,

to a Latin American tradition in which poetry delivers

information-and emotion-silenced by the powerful. Central

American Book of the Dead leaves readers with images and stories

of life, death and overcoming that refuse to be buried beneath

the superficialities of what passes for "news." A book as daring

as the migrants who undertake the perilous journey north.

-Roberto Lovato, author of Unforgetting

Balam Rodrigo's Central American Book of the Dead is a

book that all non-Central Americans, especially Mexicans, should

read. The book is a retelling of Bartolomé de las Casas' A Brief

Account of the Destruction of the Indies, but remixed to show us that

the colonial machinery is still very much at work in the "fertile

burying ground called Mexico." With Dan Bellm's brilliant and

careful translation, the book becomes the very country where

these atrocities take place. It is the self-implicating account of

Mexico's violent history, written by a Mexican, that I've been

waiting for.

-Javier Zamora, author of Unaccompanied and Solito: A

Memoir