'It all happened long time ago, no one now remembers this storylet me tell you how it all happened, how once 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 the Latin America he left behind: a journey through personal memory into a continent’s past, haunted by the Europeans who once fixed their telescopes on its shores. Helping us ‘see faces history can’t reach’, Southernmost reveals truths hidden in plain sight: the devastation of indigenous peoples and their lands; dissidents disappeared by the junta; a mother’s concealed cancer diagnosis; the clarifying sexuality of a boy whose father can’t bear to acknowledge it.
Restlessly intelligent, tender in their evocation of gay intimacy, migration, and the natural world, this virtuosic net of sonnets captures a glimpse of our world’s interconnecting threads. 'And I realised I couldn’t go on travelling – I had to stop my tour;that there was no El Dorado; their vast skies were also ours. Years later, in another country, I was also an interpreter who tried to render things from one world to another.
When I finally wake up I’m always at a loss. Where am I?I’m back home, of course. Still, outside, the strangest sky.'
Southernmost: Sonnets - Leo Boix
Price £12.99
ISBN: 9781784745851
Pub: Chatto
Pub Date: 5th June 2025
Format: Paperback
Extent: 96 pp
POETRY collection