Southernmost

Leo Boix takes us on a spellbinding voyage through time and imagination, from the Argentina of his birth – ‘the end of the world, the antipode’ – to a new life in England. Unearthing an old grief, the poet embarks on a glittering, encyclopaedic exploration of the Latin America he left behind: a journey through personal memory into a continent’s past, haunted by the Europeans who once fixed their telescopes on its shores. Helping us ‘see faces history can’t reach’, ‘Southernmost’ reveals truths hidden in plain sight: the devastation of indigenous peoples and their lands; dissidents disappeared by the junta; a mother’s concealed cancer diagnosis; the clarifying sexuality of a boy whose father can’t bear to acknowledge it.