Southernmost: Sonnets

by Leo Boix

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 144
Rating:

Synopsis:

Unearthing an old grief, the poet embarks on a glittering, encyclopaedic exploration of his own past and the Latin America he left behind- a continent haunted by the Europeans who once fixed their telescopes on its shores.

Southernmost reveals truths hidden in plain sight- colonialism's violent legacies; dissidents disappeared by the junta; a young mother's mysterious decline; the clarifying sexuality of a boy whose father can't bear to acknowledge it. At the same time, it tells a story - as sonnets have often done - about love, through Boix's intimate and original evocation of gay marriage. Restlessly intelligent, intoxicated by Latin America's landscapes and rich folklore, this virtuosic net of sonnets offers a glimpse of our world's interconnecting threads.

Leo Boix’s Southernmost: Sonnets is rather autobiographical, with poems focusing on religion, the death of his mother, and queerness (often in a very religious context). Almost all of the poems are sonnets, though there were a few that took other elements where I didn’t count the lines.

I found that the sonnet form felt really forced, and the rhymes felt a bit forced — “obvious” in the sense of being obtrusive, inelegant, not quite the right word. A really good sonnet often makes me forget about the rhyme scheme and makes it all somehow natural, but I was really aware of the intent to write a sonnet.

Combined with the subject matter, it wasn’t really my thing: poetry is very often personal, but I often like stuff that feels like it speaks to something deeper, and I didn’t get that feeling a lot here — the level of detail is so high, so specific, the poems just belong to Boix. Which is fair enough! But not my cup of tea.

I feel bad about rating such a thing so low, so a reminder: it’s always about my level of enjoyment, and not about quality, since I’m writing as a reader and explicitly rating on enjoyment. How I respond to the craft is a part of my enjoyment, but nonetheless craft doesn’t account for all of my rating.

Rating: 1/5 (“didn’t like it”)