Overview

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

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9781784745851

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Reviews

'As Terrance Hayes recast the American sonnet for the 21st Century, Leo Boix captures the spirit of Argentina in this vibrant, formally adroit and compelling sequence. Southernmost is a vivid, transhemispheric memoir of queer love, loss and migration that casts its dazzling, occasionally Gothic spell on wherever it alights, from the shores of the South Atlantic to the English Channel. Generous, vulnerable and vivifying’ * Karen McCarthy Woolf * 'Leo Boix's cartographic sonnets give queer form to interlocking personal and social histories, making music of loss and displacement. Their diasporic intellect summons ""Latin America's heart"" with equal parts rigour and play in a poetics as sinuous and expansive as the ocean between us’ * Urayoán Noel * 'In this thrilling collection of sonnets, Leo Boix maps a personal geography out of dynamic encounters between the Old World and the New, between sweeping landscapes and miniature, as he brilliantly captures the fluctuations of history, the natural world and the inner self. A splendid testament to Alexander von Humboldt’s own scientific vision and boundless curiosity, and his theory that everything is interconnected, everything interacts, every existence is part of a joyous and fragile totality' * Chloe Aridjis * Compelling… [with] observational detail, which is resplendent throughout… Sourthernmost is unflinching in its attention to Argentine history… The poems…are beautiful and unsentimental * Daily Telegraph * Boix smooths copious amounts of lived experience into taut, melodic poems that are thick with place * Guardian * [Boix’s] command of poetic English and a rich vocabulary are impressive… All in all, Southernmost: Sonnets is as disarming a collection as an album of butterflies * Morning Star *

'As Terrance Hayes recast the American sonnet for the 21st Century, Leo Boix captures the spirit of Argentina in this vibrant, formally adroit and compelling sequence. Southernmost is a vivid, transhemispheric memoir of queer love, loss and migration that casts its dazzling, occasionally Gothic spell on wherever it alights, from the shores of the South Atlantic to the English Channel. Generous, vulnerable and vivifying’ * Karen McCarthy Woolf * 'Leo Boix's cartographic sonnets give queer form to interlocking personal and social histories, making music of loss and displacement. Their diasporic intellect summons ""Latin America's heart"" with equal parts rigour and play in a poetics as sinuous and expansive as the ocean between us’ * Urayoán Noel * 'In this thrilling collection of sonnets, Leo Boix maps a personal geography out of dynamic encounters between the Old World and the New, between sweeping landscapes and miniature, as he brilliantly captures the fluctuations of history, the natural world and the inner self. A splendid testament to Alexander von Humboldt’s own scientific vision and boundless curiosity, and his theory that everything is interconnected, everything interacts, every existence is part of a joyous and fragile totality' * Chloe Aridjis *

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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