A Slightly Nasty Book: Poems / Un libro levemente odioso: Poemas

The great Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton posits a political approach to poetry and, inversely, a poetic approach to politics.

This masterful posthumous collection ranges from prose poems to the metric and semantic novelty of mini-poems or one-word-to-a-line enumerations. The I of these poems is both martyr and cynic. Dalton’s brand of revolutionary mysticism is one marked by humor and impertinence, rather than solemnity and dramatism.

Dalton was an enormously influential figure in the history of Latin America as a poet, essayist, intellectual, and revolutionary. As a poet who brilliantly fused politics and art, his example permanently changed the direction of Central American poetry.