SIMON PARSONS applauds an original, visual and movement-based take on the birth and death of a relationship
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Revelatory depiction of life in Buenos Aires slum is a tragi-comic triumph
A South American shanty town
[Leon Petrosyan/Creative Commons]
JOHN GREEN’s palette is tickled by useful information leavened by amusing and unusual anecdotes, incidental gossip and scare stories
The bard contemplates X — anti-human vomit soup with dog shit croutons — and the Tory recycling bin that is Reform
ALAN MORRISON recommends an outstanding and timely anthology of poems that reflect the experience and consequences of African migration
BINOY KAMPMARK examines the food racket as evidenced by the recent promotion of Italian cuisine to the status of ‘intangible national heritage’
FIONA O’CONNOR and MARIA DUARTE review State of Statelessness, Rental Family, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, and The Rip
Slum Virgin
by Gabriela Cabezon Camara
(Charco Press, £9.99)
IN THE El Poso slum of Buenos Aires things are starting to change for the better. Its inhabitants organise in special committees, they create a system of canals filled with large and glistening carp to eat, they grow their own vegetables and they are learning to be self-sufficient.
El Poso (“The Sediment”) is turning into a tiny utopia and all of this is apparently thanks to a strange cement Virgin Mary statuette — the Slum Virgin — that sends divine messages to the people through a “medium,” the transvestite prostitute Cleo, who renounces life on the game to try to save his shanty-town community from impending destruction.
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