IN Music For Bamboo Strings (Sundial House, £9.99) Cuban poet Carlos Pintado presents a collection of 62 prose poems, each constituting a distinct world akin to gemstones, exemplifying the beauty and sophistication of Pintado’s language alongside his profound interest in global literature, visual arts, music, film, and his surrounding environment, his beloved Havana. 

The works reference a wide array of influential figures, including Kawabata, Cheever, Anna Akhmatova, Tarkovsky and Virginia Woolf, as well as painters such as Brueghel and Van Gogh. This collection is rich in luminous language and intellectually engaging content.

Expertly translated by Lawrence Schimel, the collection resembles a splendid photo album or a series of meticulously curated postcards woven together in a vibrant, multilayered tapestry. The poems also encapsulate tenderness and emotional depth, as illustrated in The Marvel, where the poet inquires: “When I say I love you without loving you, will I be loving you? There needs to be a forest, that city that begins and ends surrounded by waters. There is a place to remember how we travelled through a province in darkness. A train wagon where we met with an angel with sharpened eyes. We will say nothing about language, about its uselessness []...] It will simply rain, another marvel. Then will come your mouth and my mouth. I will kiss you, without memory. All the slowness of the world in a kiss.” 

This is a truly remarkable collection by one of my favourite Cuban poets writing today.

Black Box Named Like To Me (Ugly Duckling Presse, £17) by Mexican artist and poet Diana Garza Islas is one of those rare poetry collections where experimentation, wordplay, musicality, rhythm and nonsense play a part. 

The collection, translated by Cal Paule as a labour of love, who did a great job at navigating some challenging passages in Spanish, including invented words and almost impossible syntax constructions, lets the reader in and out and allows for multiple interpretations and readings. 

I was particularly interested in the section Box For Labeling The Drinkable Part Of A Blown-Glass Apple, where the poet writes as if composing a symphony, incorporating different voices and tonalities, colours and variations: “Of angels calculating/ their airplanes/ in the dunes/ when Dunehill was here. (Or the anag-/ norisis of the soursop.)/ When, yesterday, we slit/ the black box. Not your motor-numberized-mandorla./ Not my lycanthropic helix that bit you/ when we slit to welcome/ nocturne ports.”

I recommend this collection for those who like experimental poetry, and to discover exciting new voices coming from Latin America. 

Rigoberto Gonzalez, a gay Chicano writer, editor, and critic, is the author of the chapbook Our Lady Of The Crossword (A Midsummer Night’s Press, £9.99). This concise volume explores themes of identity, queerness, and what it means to be a gay person of Mexican heritage living in the US. 

Gonzalez can be as ironic and humorous as he is tender and captivating, as illustrated in the poem that lends its title to the book: “I want to be the lady/ posing naked in the nicho/ of my father’s crossword./ In a temple of black and white/ tile, she’s the only page/ of beauty in Mexico’s tragic/ tabloids, her smile blessed/ with the serenity of saints/ her thigh coned like the chalice/ of a lily, breasts plump/ as cherubs and modest black stars/ over the little angel noses.” 

I enjoyed reading these poems of erotic images and sensuous bodies sparkling in the humid night of the rich US-Mexican borderlands.

Haroldo de Campos, a Brazilian avant-garde poet, critic, and one of the founders of the Poesia concreta (Concrete Poetry) movement, wrote Galaxias (Ugly Duckling Presse, £18) between 1963 and 1976. 

Each of these long, expansive poems reads like a travelogue, exploring and illuminating some of his journeys around the world. These prose poems, translated by Odile Cisneros, flow seamlessly due to their lack of punctuation. At times, they resemble a stream of consciousness, while at others, they challenge the essence of language itself. 

“yes in the world only yes carmine with his hand on his face he said goodbye an emerald made sweet in brightbeams of chagrin those eyes.” 

I was already familiar with De Campos’s concrete poems and visual works, but these lengthy, narrative, playful, and multilingual poems were a delightful revelation. They present a baroque texture that demands attention but is rich in rewarding imagery and word choices for the reader.