NOT just a means of communication, Spanglish has been described by essayist Ilan Stavans as “either the marriage or the divorce between two languages, Spanish and English, that have been with each other and at each other for over 150 years, if not more.”

[[{"fid":"15034","view_mode":"inlineright","fields":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-inlineright","data-delta":"1"}}]]One of the its best literary practitioners is Latinx poet and translator Juana Adcock. Mexican-born and based in Glasgow, her recently published bilingual collection Manca (Argonautica) is a fierce and dazzling book exploring notions of violence, dislocation, the female body and what it means to write in various languages.

Adcock delves frankly into some of the most pressing challenges facing Mexico today, including its growing violence and its deep-rooted social inequalities.

“We are now number one in the world for the industry of kidnapping,” she writes in one of the most striking poems of the collection. “I read in the paper but I’ve fled/porque no quiero saber, I don’t want to hear,/que me quiten all the number —Knowledge/can only take place within cierto radius.”

Hers is a poetry of urgency, beautifully crafted and luminous in its themes. I cannot recommend this book enough.

[[{"fid":"15035","view_mode":"inlineright","fields":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"2":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-inlineright","data-delta":"2"}}]]Cristina Rivera Garza, who has lived between Mexico and the US for most of her life, also moves between cultures, languages and traditions in her own writing.

Her surreal novel The Iliac Crest (And Other Stories), superbly translated by Sarah Booker, explores the fluid nature of gender (dis)identifications, disappearances and geopolitical borders.

At the heart of her story is Amparo Davila, a marginalised Mexican woman writer of the so-called Midcentury Generation, whose sudden appearance in the house of the unnamed narrator triggers profound questions about his vanishing masculinity and his own mysterious past.

A cleverly constructed experimental work, The Iliac Crest creates a strange universe where things are not always what they seem and it stays long in the mind.

Latinx poet Richard Blanco’s latest collection How To Love a Country (Beacon Press) weaves a national narrative of great ambition and scope with honesty and courage.

[[{"fid":"15036","view_mode":"inlineright","fields":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"3":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-inlineright","data-delta":"3"}}]]In this vibrant book, Blanco investigates what it means to be American, gay, the son of Latin American immigrants and a citizen of the world. In his striking poem Mother Country, he sings a hymn of love to his Cuban mother, as well as questioning ideas of belonging and citizenship:

“To love a country as if I was my mother last spring/hobbling, insisting I help her climb all the way up/to the US Capitol, as if she were here before you today/instead of me, explaining her tears, cheeks pink/as the cherry blossoms colouring the air that day when/she stopped, turned to me, and said: You know, mijo,/it isn’t where you’re born that matters, it’s where/you choose to die—that’s your country.”

Empty Words (And Other Stories) by Uruguayan writer Mario Levrero is a tour de force. Considered as one of the most original “rioplatense” voices of the last decades, Levrero has managed to create a powerful body of work that is as unique as thought-provoking.

[[{"fid":"15037","view_mode":"inlineright","fields":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"4":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-inlineright","data-delta":"4"}}]]This funny, ironic and deeply original novel is written in diary form by a narrator obsessed with improving his handwriting. Each entry explores a life lived in Colonia del Sacramento, a sleepy town in southwestern Uruguay, through tender anecdotes and humorous reflections — from the family dog in heat and the experiences of growing up by teenager Juan Ignacio, to the recurrent trappings of writing and the quiet existence of a middle-aged writer wholly dedicated to literature.

As the book’s able translator Annie McDermott comments, “through a kind of graphological self-therapy,” the author “searches for a flow, a rhythm, a seemingly empty form that guides his hand, uncovering the mystery of this ‘empty’ text as he goes along.”