Lantana; or, the indissoluble exhalation

bruno darío (trans. Kit Schluter)

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.

'Dizzy with Cocteauvian elegance, Lautréamontean resourcefulness, and Keatsian wild surmise, bruno darío’s Lantana trilogy reminds us what Poetry requires of her devotees: that we be inconsolable, afflicted by beauty, that we make a bed in it, a bower and a bier.' – Joyelle McSweeney