“Bolano wrote with the high-voltage first-person braininess of a Saul Bellow and an extreme subversive vision of his own.” –Francisco Goldman, The New York Times Magazine

“A witty, sardonic poetry, the likes of which could be called ‘unimproved’–lacking the polish of a shiny commodity. With Bolaño, we encounter not only the ‘fist-fucking’ but ‘feet-fucking’ in a poem that also mentions Pascal, Nazi generals, Shining Path bonfires, and a teenage hooker. With Bolaño, the explicit description of a sexual encounter is fragmented by temporal disjunctions, heuristic leaps of thought and a barking dog; in the end, God and an author show up…. The poems shine their beery light on life’s romantic dogs; dreamers, detectives, and poets who do double-time as saints and martyrs.” –Forrest Gander, The Nation

Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) has caught on like a house on fire, and The Romantic Dogs, a bilingual collection of forty-four poems, offers American readers their first chance to encounter this literary phenomenon as a poet: his own first and strongest literary persona. These poems, wide-ranging in forms and length, have appeared in magazines such as Harper’s, Threepenny Review, The Believer, Boston Review, Poetry, Soft Targets, Tin House, The Nation, Circumference, A Public Space, and Conduit. Bolaño’s poetic voice is like no other’s.

Publishers Weekly praised The Romantic Dogs in its review:

“The Savage Detectives, the best-known novel by the Chilean-born Bolaño (1953–2003) recently found spectacular success across the English-speaking world, bringing much attention to his other work. Now comes a very competently rendered bilingual selection of his fiery, if sometimes uncontrolled, verse. Bolaño began as a poet, and some of the work here seems to have come from an extraordinarily young man: a record of stormy, untamed teen emotion—the depths of despair (‘From these nightmares I'll retain only/ these poor houses’) or the heights of sexual adventures. Bolaño moves easily into a blend of surrealism and populism, with in-your-face gestures learned perhaps from Pablo Neruda, as when he watches ‘a trail of nurses and a trail of scorpions’ wending their ways home. Other poems are closely tied to The Savage Detectives: Bolaño's dreamt motorcycle journey in ‘The Donkey,’ mirroring the life of the real poet Mario Santiago, will send readers back to the fictionalized portrayals of Bolaño and Santiago (Arturo and Ulises) in the novel. Bolaño the poet's ‘deliberate immaturity/ And splendors glimpsed on another planet’ can delight: they echo his brilliant but out-of-control authorial persona, with its high-speed, self-conscious verbal play, and those echoes will be more than enough to lead fans of his prose straight to his verse."

Download "The Detectives" from The Romantic Dogs.

Date of Publication: November 2008

EXCERPT: "The Worm," from The Romantic Dogs

Let us give thanks for our poverty, said the guy dressed in rags.
I saw him with my own eyes: drifting through a town of houses in ruin,
built of brick and mortar, between United States and Mexico.
Let us give thanks for our violence, he said, even if it’s futile
like a ghost, even if it leads to nothing,
just as these roads lead nowhere.
I saw him with my own eyes: gesturing over a rosy background
that resisted the black, ah, twilight on the border,
glimpsed and lost forever.
Twilights that enveloped Lisa’s father
at the beginning of the fifties.
Twilights that gave witness to Mario Santiago,
up and down, frozen stiff, in the backseat
of a contrabandist’s car. Twilights
of infinite white and infinite black.

I saw him with my own eyes: he looked like a worm with a straw hat
and an assassin’s glare
and he traveled through the towns of northern Mexico
as if wandering lost, evicted from the mind,
evicted from the grand dream, the dream of all,
and his words were, madre mía, terrifying.

He looked like a worm with a straw hat,
white clothes
and an assassin’s glare.
And he traveled like a fool
through the towns of northern Mexico
without daring to yield,
without choosing
to go down to the D.F.
I saw him with my own eyes
coming and going
with traveling vendors and drunks,
feared,
shouting his promises through streets
lined with adobes.
He looked like a white worm
with a Bali between his lips
or an unfiltered Delicados.
And he traveled, from one side to the other
of dreams,
just like an earthworm,
dragging his desperation,
devouring it.

A white worm with a straw hat
under the northern Mexican sun,
in soils watered with blood and the mendacious words
of the frontier, the gateway to the Body seen by Sam Peckinpah,
the gateway to the evicted Mind, the pure little
whip, and the damned white worm was right there,
with his straw hat and cigarette hanging
from his lower lip, and he had the same assassin’s
glare, as always.

I saw him and told him I have three lumps on my head
and science can no longer do a thing for me.
I saw him and told him get out of my tracks, you blowhard,
poetry is braver than anyone,
the soils watered with blood can jerk me off, the evicted Mind
hardly rattles my senses.
From these nightmares I’ll retain only
these poor houses,
these wind-swept streets
and not your assassin’s glare.

He looked like a white worm with his straw hat
and handgun under his shirt
and he never stopped talking to himself or with whomever
about a village
at least two- or three-thousand years old,
up there in the north, next to the border
with the United States,
a place that still existed,
only forty houses,
two cantinas,
and a grocery store to speak of,
a town of vigilantes and assassins
like he himself,
adobe houses and cement patios
where one’s eyes were forever hitched
to the horizon
(that flesh-colored horizon
like a dying man’s back).
And what did they hope to see appear there? I asked.
The wind and dust, maybe.
A minimal dream
but one on which they staked
all their stubbornness, all their will.

He looked like a white worm with a straw hat and a Delicados
hanging from his lower lip.
He looked like a twenty-two year-old Chilean walking into Café la Habana
and checking out a blonde girl
seated in the back,
in the evicted Mind.
They looked like the midnight walks
of Mario Santiago.
In the evicted Mind.
In the enchanted mirrors.
In the hurricane of Mexico City.
The severed fingers were growing back
with surprising speed.
Severed fingers,
fractured,
scattered
in the air of Mexico City.

Copyright © 2006 by the Heirs of Roberto Bolaño and English translation copyright © 2008 by Laura Healy