The Romantic Dogs

Roberto Bolaño

Translated by Laura Healy
19 May 2016
9781509828821
160 pages

Synopsis

The Romantic Dogs is a bilingual collection of forty-four poems presents English readers with a chance to encounter the phenomenon of Roberto Bolaño as a poet: his own preferred and strongest literary persona. (When asked, ‘What makes you believe that you’re a better poet than a novelist?’ Bolaño replied, ‘The poetry makes me blush less.’) These poems – intimate, moving, witty and wide-ranging – are as diverse in form as his fiction and will offer the reader equal delight. Expertly translated from the original Spanish by Laura Healy, this is as an opportunity to encounter a poetic voice like no other; a voice hailed by Susan Sontag as ‘the real thing and the rarest’.
Wonderfully unreserved.
They radiate the audacity of intellect, as well as the cruelty of vision, that have won their author a devoted following.
They [the poems] echo his brilliant but out-of-control authorial persona, with its high-speed, self-conscious verbal play, and those echoes will be more than enough to lead fans of his prose straight to his verse.