Lantana, or The Indissoluble Exhalation by Bruno Darío

"Mexico has a duty to keep this work alive: bruno darío is a truly extraordinary poet." —Francisco Hernández

By the time of his death at twenty-nine, bruno darío had already left a surprising and indelible mark on Mexican poetry with Lantana; or, the indissoluble exhalation, a trilogy comprising the three full-length books he published in his lifetime. By turns sardonic and lyrical, scathing and irreverent, the hallucinatory sequence centers on the relationship of a young man (the Inconsolable) and an older woman who unexpectedly takes her own life (Lantana/Anfitriona). Across the three books, darío seamlessly code-switches between registers and genres: soliloquies from people, places, and things; the Inconsolable’s notes, poems, and letters; the discourses of Lantana’s buried corpse as gravity pulls her deeper into the soil. Lantana is a kaleidoscopic assemblage of texts that experiments with centuries of poetic tradition and firmly establishes darío as one of Mexico’s most daring poets.

This bilingual edition, featuring a biographical translator’s introduction by Kit Schluter, marks the first appearance of darío’s complete trilogy in a single volume.

bruno darío (Cuernavaca, Morelos, 1993) Some of his books are: El opuesto de la flor (Taller Ditoria), Poèmes très tard (RAZ ÉDITIONS; bilingual edition; trad. Sara Zarco, Guillaume Guesnon-Marinelli), celebración, espanto (Ediciones Sin Nombre), mal de aire (Vaso Roto), and asolar (Vaso Roto). These last three are part of a three-episode drama. He is part of the anthologies 86/96 (La Ruina Editorial) and Salones de Belleza / The Beauty Salons (Gato Negro Ediciones, E. M. Wolfman, UNAM; bilingual edition; trad. Kit Schluter). He has been published in The Canary, Letras Libres, Periódico de Poesía UNAM, among others.