BENITO JUAREZ, who, being of Zapotec origin, became Mexico’s first and only indigenous president in 1858 and the first democratically elected indigenous president in the postcolonial Americas, spent nearly 18 months in New Orleans in the early 1850s as a political exile.

Despite numerous historical accounts and his well-known autobiography, these 18 months in New Orleans were a mysterious void in the record.

What did Juarez do in the city soon after a major yellow fever epidemic swept through it? What did he see, and who did he meet ?

Season of the Swamp (And Other Stories, £14.99) by Mexican writer Yuri Herrera offers a unique and intriguing perspective. It is a fictional attempt to reconstruct those momentous months in a state still selling slaves, in a narrative that is both captivating and thought-provoking.

The book, translated by Lisa Dillman, starts when Juarez disembarks in the Louisiana port city and experiences the US for the first time. “His reception on disembarking from the packet boat had been a foretaste of all that was to come: waiting and waiting and not knowing words and not being seen and learning the secret names of things,” explains the narrator. 

There are echoes of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in Herrera’s novel: from a decadent tavern where music emanates, to the sticky and humid atmosphere that consumes the place, to the darkness surrounding the bloody and violent slave trade, everything seems to stagnate around the Mexican politician and his group of comrades, slowed down by exile.

Even though this may not be Herrera’s best book, it is still a fascinating account of a man who played a significant role in shaping the history of Mexico. The book reads like a travel diary, with a mix of white enslavers, creoles, assassins, sailors, prostitutes, political exiles and drunks, revealing an underground world of people and stories as if emerging from the depths.

Also by a Mexican author is Invisible Dog (Carcanet, £12.99), a poetry collection written by Fabio Morabito and lucidly translated by Welsh poet and translator Richard Gwyn.

The book is filled with unforgettable poems addressing themes of masculinity, philosophy and the relentless passage of time, often with dark humour and irony, both well-known qualities of Morabito’s oeuvre. 

Among my favourite poems in this collection is I Came Into The World, where Morabito writes about Alexandria, in Egypt, where he was born in 1955 before moving to Mexico City at 15. “My true luxury/ is this: to have been born/ where I never need to return/ is almost not to have been born./ When I die/ if I have to die,/ I will die further away than anyone.” 

There is also My Son Plays On My Back, where the poet writes tenderly about fatherhood and his son growing up. The poem evokes the memory of being the horse, and carrying the son who plays the cowboy. After a break, they’re both on the floor looking at the ceiling: “I am no longer his horse. He doesn’t say it,/ but he thinks it. He has dismounted/ from me, his centaur, forever,/ onto the ground of all/ that makes the world go around.” 

A stunning collection.

The Month of the Flies (Ugly Duckling Presse, $14), by Argentine poet Sergio Chejfec and translated by Silvina Lopez Medin and Rebekah Smith, is a rare book that transports you to a different state of mind.

The collection is inspired by the work Book No 8: 1970 by Argentine artist Mirtha Dermisache (1940-2021), composed of a series of graphics, in line with poematic criteria, across 14 pages, each containing a variable number of verses.

Chejfec imagines a couple travelling to Martin Garcia island in Buenos Aires, an almost mythical and enigmatic place in the Tigre Delta, during the so-called month of the flies, when insects take over. 

The words in the poem begin to cluster together in unexpected ways and sometimes become illegible, almost like the movement of flies out of control, alluding perhaps to the ungraspable meaning of life and death: “Faroff, attimes,/ we would see Buenos Aires lessclearly,/ but more precisely, silhouetted./ The city’s profile stood out, miniaturized, and alittle/ blurry dueto solar refraction,/ but atthesametime still a view/ so precise.” 

The fact that Dermisache created her piece just a few years before the bloody Military Dictatorship in Argentina and that Martin Garcia is where some political activists fled to escape the military junta gives this book another layer of meaning.

It makes the illegible turn into an act of resistance, where the voice of the poet and the artist prevails amidst darkness, where clarity and confusion collide. A fascinating book of experimental qualities exploring the limits of language and human existence.