Southernmost: Sonnets

A family sets out on a journey across South America, thereby setting in motion a glittering, encyclopaedic evocation of the continent, and a reckoning with its past both personal and political.

Vivid ... A memoir of queer love, loss and migration ... dazzling - Karen McCarthy Woolf, author of Top Doll

It all happened a long time ago, no one now remembers this story let me tell you how it all happened, how we turned unholy.

In 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 his own past and the Latin America he left behind - a continent haunted by the Europeans who once fixed their telescopes on its shores.

Southernmost reveals truths hidden in plain sight - colonialism's violent legacies; dissidents disappeared by the junta; a young mother's mysterious decline; the clarifying sexuality of a boy whose father can't bear to acknowledge it. At the same time, it tells a story - as sonnets have often done - about love, through Boix's intimate and original evocation of gay marriage. Restlessly intelligent, intoxicated by Latin America's landscapes and rich folklore, this virtuosic net of sonnets offers a glimpse of our world's interconnecting threads.

In this thrilling collection of sonnets, Leo Boix maps a personal geography out of dynamic encounters between the Old World and the New - Chloe Aridjis, author of Sea Monsters

As sinuous and expansive as the ocean between us - Urayoan Noel, author of Transversal