Field Guide

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Don Share. We cherish our illusions so that we can enter reality; and what we imagine can seem to us as real as what we actually see before our eyes every day. Suppose we were given a field guide designed to help us classify such things, to help us navigate our lives. The renowned Colombian love poet and novelist Darío Jaramillo Agudelo has provided us just such a useful—and fanciful—poetic reference work in his Guia para viajeros, translated from the Spanish by Don Share. In this book, which reads like a series of interrelated prose poems, you will encounter fantastic creatures whose behavior suggests new and previously undreamed of ways to obtain roses, to play music, to drink wine, to put words in a new, magical order, and even to fly. In this collection of charming yet slightly dark caprices, you will encounter a world of creatures whose foibles, romances, moods, and dreams resemble, strangely enough, our own.