Central American Book of the Dead

Poet Balam Rodrigo's Central American Book of the Dead (Libro centroamericano

de los muertos), winner of the 2018 Premio Aguascalientes, Mexico's highest poetry

honor, is a sequence of poems in multiple voices, interwoven with the author's own

narrative, about Central American migrants and refugees, living and dead, journeying

through Mexico to the north. The book also interweaves altered passages from A Brief

Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552) by Bartolomé de las Casas, a Spanish

colonist (later friar and bishop) who became the first and fiercest critic of Spanish

colonialism in the New World and the enslavement of indigenous people.

The work's importance has already been well recognized in Mexico. For readers

in the U.S. and the English-speaking world, it draws a compelling portrait of one of the

most critical stories of our time, in poems of great formal variety and lyrical depth: the

massive migration of Central Americans fleeing terror, crime, and extreme poverty, and

the persecution and danger they face in traveling through Mexico to the United States.

The book is divided into five sections, for the five main countries of origin in this

migration: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Mexico itself. Each section

contains portraits of migrants; first-person testimonies of the dead, often titled by the

precise locations where their bodies may be found; and poems that deploy varied

sources, including news stories and political and scientific reports, to give fuller context

to the human tales. The beginning and end of the book, and each of its five sections, are

framed by what Rodrigo calls a palimpsest: his altered passages from Bartolomé de las

Casas' classic cry of protest, situating the work within a broader Latin American story.

Poems from the English translation of Libro centroamericano have appeared in

Asymptote, Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets, and Poetry International.