After Rubén

After Rubén unfolds as a decades-long journey in poems and prose, braiding the personal, the political the historical, interspersing along the way English-language versions riffs of a Spanish-language master: Rubén Darío. Whether it’s biting portraits of public figures, or nuanced sketches of his father, Francisco Aragón has assembled his most expansive collection to date, evoking his native San Francisco, but also imagining ancestral spaces in Nicaragua. Readers will encounter pieces that splice lines from literary forebearers, a moving elegy to a sibling, a surprising epistle from the grave. In short: a book that is both trajectory mosaic, complicating the conversation surrounding poetry in the Americas—above all as it relates to Latinx and queer poetics.