STEVE JOHNSON recommends a beautiful album of songs that celebrate summer, from May Day onwards
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Letters from Latin America with Leo Boix: March 4, 2025
A pamphlet by British Latinx poet Patrick Romero McCafferty, poetry by Anglo-Argentinian Miguel Cullen, and a book of conjuring poems by Mexican Pedro Serrano
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The bard celebrates two other fine practitioners of the art, and laments a lost brewer
This right-wing conspiracy theory is used to justify the coercive measures against gender, race and labour rights that best serve capitalism, attests GAVIN O’TOOLE
IN glass knot sun (Ignition Press, £7) British Latinx poet and editor Patrick Romero McCafferty unveils a personal narrative that transports readers from Mexico to Scotland and back. The book explores the materiality of the land, soil and human labour with striking beauty and profound insight.
The pamphlet, featuring 18 powerful poems, begins with Espiritu Santo With Snorkeller ’17, a visual poem that depicts a landscape in Mexico with mountains, the sun, a tranquil sea, and undercurrents represented by moving symbols “>==o> >==o>”. There is something mysterious and suggestive about this poem, which precedes A Doorway Between Explosions, written by the author about the San Juanico Disaster in Mexico City in 1984.
Here, Romero McCafferty underscores the human suffering resulting from a tragedy that claimed more than 500 lives and left around 7,000 people severely burned:
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A ghost story by Mexican Ave Barrera, a Surrealist poetry collection by Peruvian Cesar Moro, and a manifesto-poem on women’s labour and capitalist havoc by Peruvian Valeria Roman Marroquin
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