Southernmost: Sonnets by Leo Boix; An Interesting Detail by Kimberly Campanello; Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon; Goonie by Michael Mullen; The Age of Olive Trees by Haia Mohammed
Southernmost: Sonnets by Leo Boix (Chatto & Windus, £12.99)
Boix’s second collection is a kind of gay Catholic Latin bildungsroman, beginning with daily life in Buenos Aires as “Mother / sits next to me. Father stares opposite. A red snail / comes out of my mouth.” Queer angst abounds as the speaker moves to England, looking for romantic connection. Boix smooths copious, rarely stalling amounts of lived experience and research into taut, melodic poems that are thick with place: “Humboldt and Bonpland at the Chimbrazo Base / and behind them the highest mountain of Ecuador / rising up, all covered in snow like a tall dessert ice.” The “hidden thread that binds” this book together is the dominant feeling of connection and love for one’s land and others.
An Interesting Detail by Kimberly Campanello (Bloomsbury, £10.99)
“Details aren’t automatically interesting,” writes Sarah Manguso in her book of aphorisms, 300 Arguments. Campanello’s sentences are comparable to Sarah Manguso’s: fierce, breathless, seducing the ear by rhythmic propulsion and monosyllabic control, and all while teetering on the blurred boundary between short story and prose poem: “It’s no surprise that at Thanksgiving we wish we had never happened upon the world.” She meditates on power, the environment, writing, and questions the supposedly redemptive power of chronic pain: “I continue to await / the perspective this feeling / ought to bring.” The opening gambit reveals a poet disenchanted with – or perhaps no longer satisfied by – poems situated in the stratosphere, amid “church” or “cathedral bells” ringing, nor in the dark, indescribable mystery that is “beneath the sea”. Campanello’s poetics are startlingly inventive, even as she admits “books don’t know what’s inside their covers, or they don’t care”. This is a work to care about.
