After Rubén

After Rubén is a collection of poems and prose that unfolds over decades, weaving together the personal, the political and the historical. Along the way Francisco Aragón includes English-language versions of, and riffs on, the work of the Spanish-language master Rubén Darío.

It is his most expansive collection so far. It contains biting portraits of public figures and finely observed sketches of his father, and it evokes his native San Francisco while imagining the ancestral places of Nicaragua. Readers will find poems that splice together lines from literary forebears, a moving elegy for a sibling and a surprising letter written from the grave.

The book is both a trajectory and a mosaic, and it complicates the conversation about poetry in the Americas, especially where it touches on Latinx and queer poetics.