Ballad of a Happy Immigrant

In Ballad of a Happy Immigrant Leo Boix demonstrates the power of a poem to move not just the mind but the body. These are supple, evocative, sensuous poems that ripple with life from a poet who can do in two languages what many of us struggle to do in one

Here, dear readers, you will find charms and bees, crows and legends, much silence and even more truth-seeking. You will find immigrant's songs, and love whispers to the planet, all set to music that is as inimitable as it's lush. It isn't often that one encounters a sensibility so interested in our world - and so compelling in its powers of attentiveness. Leo Boix's poetry has a wide tilt and scope. It sings the doors open

As well as having a subtle mastery of forms, Boix is playfully inventive

Boix... has attempted something that few poets dare and even fewer achieve - to write in an adopted language... [he] handles words like a beachcomber, relishing them and experimenting with combinations and visual arrangements

'It isn't often that one encounters a sensibility so interested in our world - and so compelling in its powers of attentiveness. Leo Boix's poetry has a wide tilt and scope. It sings the doors open' Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic 
 
'They are sailors from another century, stalwart / captured on daguerrotype, casually masculine, tender of heart.' 
 
In the middle of the last century, the SS General Pueyrredón from Buenos Aires deposits Leo Boix's paternal grandfather on English soil for the first time. In the two years he spends there, he acquires a taste for his new homeland: from taking his tea white - muy blanco - to plunging into unfamiliar sensual worlds. 
 
So begins the poet's own journey, arriving in the United Kingdom as a young queer man. Ballad of a Happy Immigrant tells of the life he makes there: a dazzling collection of what it means to live, love and write between two cultures and traditions. Effortlessly moving between the English imagination and Spanish language, it is a boundless exploration of otherness and home, and the personal transformation that follows between 'loss / and a life / that starts anew.' 
 
*A Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice*

Leo Boix

'As Terrance Hayes recast the American sonnet for the 21st Century, Leo Boix captures the spirit of Argentina in this vibrant, formally adroit and compelling sequence. Southernmost is a vivid, transhemispheric memoir of queer love, loss and migration that casts its dazzling, occasionally Gothic spell on wherever it alights, from the shores of the South Atlantic to the English Channel. Generous, vulnerable and vivifying’

'Leo Boix's cartographic sonnets give queer form to interlocking personal and social histories, making music of loss and displacement. Their diasporic intellect summons "Latin America's heart" with equal parts rigour and play in a poetics as sinuous and expansive as the ocean between us’

'In this thrilling collection of sonnets, Leo Boix maps a personal geography out of dynamic encounters between the Old World and the New, between sweeping landscapes and miniature, as he brilliantly captures the fluctuations of history, the natural world and the inner self. A splendid testament to Alexander von Humboldt’s own scientific vision and boundless curiosity, and his theory that everything is interconnected, everything interacts, every existence is part of a joyous and fragile totality'

Compelling… [with] observational detail, which is resplendent throughout… Sourthernmost is unflinching in its attention to Argentine history… The poems…are beautiful and unsentimental

Boix smooths copious amounts of lived experience into taut, melodic poems that are thick with place

[Boix’s] command of poetic English and a rich vocabulary are impressive… All in all, Southernmost: Sonnets is as disarming a collection as an album of butterflies

'Vivid ... A memoir of queer love, loss and migration … dazzling’ Karen McCarthy Woolf, author of Top Doll 
 
'It all happened a long time ago, no one now remembers this story 
let me tell you how it all happened, how 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 his own past and the Latin America he left behind: a continent haunted by the Europeans who once fixed their telescopes on its shores. 
 
Southernmost reveals truths hidden in plain sight: colonialism’s violent legacies; dissidents disappeared by the junta; a young mother’s mysterious decline; the clarifying sexuality of a boy whose father can’t bear to acknowledge it. At the same time, it tells a story – as sonnets have often done – about love, through Boix’s intimate and original evocation of gay marriage. Restlessly intelligent, intoxicated by Latin America’s landscapes and rich folklore, this virtuosic net of sonnets offers a glimpse of our world’s interconnecting threads. 
 
'In this thrilling collection of sonnets, Leo Boix maps a personal geography out of dynamic encounters between the Old World and the New' Chloe Aridjis, author of Sea Monsters 
 
'As sinuous and expansive as the ocean between us’ Urayoán Noel, author of Transversal

Leo Boix

Praise for Southernmost: Sonnets

'As Terrance Hayes recast the American sonnet for the 21st Century, Leo Boix captures the spirit of Argentina in this vibrant, formally adroit and compelling sequence. Southernmost is a vivid, < ...

'Leo Boix's cartographic sonnets give queer form to interlocking personal and social histories, making music of loss and displacement. Their diasporic intellect summons "Latin America's heart" with equal part ...

'In this thrilling collection of sonnets, Leo Boix maps a personal geography out of dynamic encounters between the Old World and the New, between sweeping landscapes and miniature, as he brilliantly ...

'As Terrance Hayes recast the American sonnet for the 21st Century, Leo Boix captures the spirit of Argentina in this vibrant, formally adroit and compelling sequence. Southernmost is a vivid, < ...

'Leo Boix's cartographic sonnets give queer form to interlocking personal and social histories, making music of loss and displacement. Their diasporic intellect summons "Latin America's heart" with equal part ...

'In this thrilling collection of sonnets, Leo Boix maps a personal geography out of dynamic encounters between the Old World and the New, between sweeping landscapes and miniature, as he brilliantly ...

'As Terrance Hayes recast the American sonnet for the 21st Century, Leo Boix captures the spirit of Argentina in this vibrant, formally adroit and compelling sequence. Southernmost is a vivid, < ...

'Leo Boix's cartographic sonnets give queer form to interlocking personal and social histories, making music of loss and displacement. Their diasporic intellect summons "Latin America's heart" with equal part ...

'In this thrilling collection of sonnets, Leo Boix maps a personal geography out of dynamic encounters between the Old World and the New, between sweeping landscapes and miniature, as he brilliantly ...

Books by Leo Boix

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter