Romantic Dogs, The

Roberto Bolano (1953-2003) has caught on like a house on fire, andThe Romantic Dogs, a bilingual collection of forty-four poems, offers American readers their first chance to encounter this literary phenomenon as a poet: his own first and strongest literary persona. These poems, wide-ranging in forms and length, have appeared in magazines such asHarper's,Threepenny Review,The Believer,Boston Review,Soft Targets,Tin House,The Nation,Circumference,A Public Space, andConduit. Bolano's poetic voice is like no other's: "At that time, I'd reached the age of twenty/and I was crazy. /I'd lost a country/but won a dream./Long as I had that dream/nothing else mattered...."