Puerta del Sol

Francisco Aragón extends the map of Latino poetry in this bilingual collection. Taking its title from the central plaza in Madrid, it chronicles an overseas journey both public and private. Life in the capital—taking in jazz at a café after dark, navigating the underground landscapes of the Metro to and from work—is interwoven with the more interior realms of loss in poems that mourn a parent, retrace the steps of a late mentor, or express the collective grief borne of terrorism. The work, in essence, inhabits a seldom explored bicultural space; for Aragón the author is also Aragón the translator, shaping with his own hand Spanish versions of all these poems, thereby embodying the years he shuttled between his native California and his adopted Spain.