A majestic, visionary and life-spanning collection of poetry from the first great classic writer of the 21^stcentury, Roberto Bolano.

Though he reached international literary stardom for his novels, Roberto Bolaño always considered himself, first and foremost, a poet. This volume unites more than three hundred poems, written from his youth to his final years, that probe the animating themes at the core of his oeuvre: literature, politics, exile, love, death. Audacious and unique, this collection reveals Bolaño’s full, extraordinary life in verse.

‘An epic artistic journey . . . filled with sorrows and joys and discoveries’ Los Angeles Times

‘Bolaño was a game changer: his field was politics, poetry and melancholia . . . and his writing was always unparalleled’ Mariana Enríquez

Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City, where he was a founder of the Infrarealism poetry movement. Described by the New York Times as ‘the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation’, he was the author of over twenty works, including The Savage Detectives, which received the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize when it appeared in 1998, and 2666, which posthumously won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Bolaño died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty, just as his writing found global recognition.