Ballad of a Happy Immigrant

By Leo Boix

Book Overview

'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 Pueyrred n 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*

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1784743518
• ISBN13: 9781784743512
• Release Date: May 2022
• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.3" x 8.4"