From Rubén Darío's quest to renew the Spanish language to César Vallejo's linking of religion and politics, from Jorge Luis Borges's cosmopolitanism to Pablo Neruda's placement of poetry as uncompromising speaker for the downtrodden, and from Alejandra Pizarnik's agonies of the self to Humberto Ak'Abal's examination of all things indigenous, it is through verse that the hemisphere's cantankerous collective soul in an age of overhaul might best be understood.A brilliant, moving, and thought-provoking summation of these forking paths, The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry invites us to look at an illustrious literary tradition with fresh eyes. Ilan Stavans, one of the foremost scholars of Hispanic culture and a distinguished translator, goes beyond easy geographical and linguistic categorizations in gathering these works. This bilingual anthology features eighty-four authors from sixteen different countries writing in Spanish, Portuguese, Mapuche, Nahuatl, Quechua, Mazatec, Zapotec, Ladino, and Spanglish. The poems are rendered into English in inspired fashion by first-rate translators such as Elizabeth Bishop, Galway Kinnell, W. S. Merwin, Alastair Reid, Mark Strand, and Richard Wilbur.In these pages the reader will experience the power of poetry to account for a hundred years in the life of a restless continent.

    . . participating in a vision already lost to the world." —William Carlos WilliamsThe microgram is collected, pondered upon, and defined in this quiet classic of Ecuadorian literature.In the alphabet of thingsthe snail inventsthe penultimate letter.Jorge Carrera Andrade (1902–1978) has been recognized as one of the most important Latin American poets of the twentieth century.Alejandro de Acosta and Joshua Beckman co-translated Carlos Oquendo de Amat's 5 Meters of Poems. Beckman's translation of Tomaž Šalamun's Poker was a finalist for the PEN/America Poetry in Translation Award.