Overview

A dazzling debut collection of migration, home and homeland from an important Latinx voice 'It isn't often that one encounters a sensibility so interested in our world - and so compelling in its powers of attentiveness. Leo Boix's poetry has a wide tilt and scope. It sings the doors open' Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic 'They are sailors from another century, stalwart / captured on daguerrotype, casually masculine, tender of heart.' In the middle of the last century, the SS General Pueyrred n from Buenos Aires deposits Leo Boix's paternal grandfather on English soil for the first time. In the two years he spends there, he acquires a taste for his new homeland- from taking his tea white - muy blanco - to plunging into unfamiliar sensual worlds. So begins the poet's own journey, arriving in the United Kingdom as a young queer man. Ballad of a Happy Immigrant tells of the life he makes there- a dazzling collection of what it means to live, love and write between two cultures and traditions. Effortlessly moving between the English imagination and Spanish language, it is a boundless exploration of otherness and home, and the personal transformation that follows between 'loss / and a life / that starts anew.' *A Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice*

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9781784743512

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Reviews

Here, dear readers, you will find charms and bees, crows and legends, much silence and even more truth-seeking. You will find immigrant's songs, and love whispers to the planet, all set to music that is as inimitable as it's lush. It isn't often that one encounters a sensibility so interested in our world - and so compelling in its powers of attentiveness. Leo Boix's poetry has a wide tilt and scope. It sings the doors open -- Ilya Kaminsky

In Ballad of a Happy Immigrant Leo Boix demonstrates the power of a poem to move not just the mind but the body. These are supple, evocative, sensuous poems that ripple with life from a poet who can do in two languages what many of us struggle to do in one -- Kayo Chingonyi Here, dear readers, you will find charms and bees, crows and legends, much silence and even more truth-seeking. You will find immigrant's songs, and love whispers to the planet, all set to music that is as inimitable as it's lush. It isn't often that one encounters a sensibility so interested in our world - and so compelling in its powers of attentiveness. Leo Boix's poetry has a wide tilt and scope. It sings the doors open -- Ilya Kaminsky

Author Information

Leo Boix is a Latinx bilingual poet, translator and educator born in Argentina who lives in the UK. His first collection, Ballad of a Happy Immigrant (2021), was a Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice. Boix is the co-director of Un Nuevo Sol, a national scheme to nurture new Latinx writers in the UK. He is the editor of Hemisferio Cuir- An Anthology of Young Queer Latin American Poetry (2025). He was the recipient of the Bart Wolffe Poetry Prize 2018, the Keats-Shelley Prize 2019 and a PEN Award in 2021.

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