CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Letters from Latin America
Reviews of fiction by Argentinean Natalia Casali, poetry by Salvadoran-American Janel Pineda and Colombian Maria Paz Guerrero and an essay by Puerto Rican Nicole Cecilia Delgado
Salvadoran poet and educator Janel Pineda
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
“THE WAR never happened but somehow you and I/still exist. Like obsidian,/we know only the memory of lava/and not the explosion that created/us.”
In these opening verses of Lineage of Rain (Haymarket Books, £7.99), Salvadoran poet and educator Janel Pineda begins her mesmerising story, one of Salvadoran migration, diaspora and the US-sponsored civil war that fuses the personal with the communal and the political with everyday life.
Each poem in this powerful pamphlet sings its own beautiful tune, taking the reader on a journey of discoveries and redemption, from El Salvador to Los Angeles and back. There are moving family narratives where women take centre stage, as in Rain, where the grandmother Tana passes down stories and memories to her granddaughter.
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JULIA TOPPIN recommends Patti Smith’s eloquent memoir that wrestles with the beauty and sorrow of a lifetime
MEIC BIRTWISTLE offers an appreciation of the renaissance man GARETH MILES
HENRY BELL welcomes a fine demonstration of the need to love the words themselves in the communication of political messages
A ghost story by Mexican Ave Barrera, a Surrealist poetry collection by Peruvian Cesar Moro, and a manifesto-poem on women’s labour and capitalist havoc by Peruvian Valeria Roman Marroquin