On the night of March 21, I attended a poetry reading at a bar in Roma Sur in Mexico City for the late poet bruno darío’s book el opuesto de la flor (“the opposite of a flower”). darío died from brain cancer in 2022 at the age of 29 and had left an indelible mark on the poetry scene in Mexico City during his brief, prolific life.
The reading was unlike anything I had seen: the event organizers gathered everyone into the bar and we stood in a concentric mob facing each other, readers taking turns to read from their place in the audience. darío’s friends read his work and told stories from their friendships with him, such as one telling of an encounter darío had with the police at a checkpoint in Veracruz. After a brief conversation with an officer, darío offered his hand, but quickly pulled back, and held it up to his ear like a telephone, landing him in jail for the night! This light-hearted prank in the face of authority demonstrates darío’s irreverence, and his irrepressible sense of play. Listening to darío’s writing, I sensed a magical quality that came alive that night in the bar, evoking the breadth of human emotions with his rhythmic syntax and fantastical mastery of form.
Lantana; or, the indissoluble exhalation by bruno darío was translated from Spanish by Kit Schluter and released in June 2025 from Ugly Duckling Presse. It is the first in any language to bring together darío’s first three books, celebración, espato (feast, fright); mal de aire (airsickness); and asolar (raze), into a trilogy. This book contains both the English translation as well as the original Spanish text. Schluter, a close friend to darío, proposed to translate his poetry into English in the summer of 2020 after darío admitted that his cancer had returned following a remission and he had no intention of fighting it. Between trips to Coatapec and later weekly translation meetings in CDMX, Schluter and darío spent time throughout his last two years alive collaborating on the translation. darío wrote in both Spanish and in “a peculiar, mutant English,” says Schluter, and as per the author’s request, the original English was left intact and marked with a dagger-asterisk. Together they were able to translate up to ten pages short of the third book raze’s completion before darío’s untimely death in September 2022.
Lantana is an experiment in form composed of soliloquies, letters, and lyrical poetry to tell a tragic love story between two characters: the Inconsolable and an older woman named Anfitriona (which translates to “hostess”). Behind a heart-lurching romance, darío employs themes of isolation that resonate with contemporary life, and seams the story together with sardonic humor and an uncanny sensibility. As Remedios Varo did in her paintings, darío assembles an assortment of surreal scenes taking shape in gatherings of people, interior spaces, and the natural world, often through dreams or his enigmatic imagination. His use of wordplay reimagines the potentiality of language to conjure up new meanings that make way for new perspectives, new ways of relating to the self, to others, and to mortality. darío’s techniques of splintering the self—the two main characters of Lantana can be read as a fracturing of darío’s own conscience—and interrogating the relationship between interiority and exteriority with cryptic symbolism are both reminiscent of Alejandra Pizarnik’s work, such as The Most Foreign Country. Coincidentally, Pizarnik and darío both studied philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires.
Feast, fright, the first volume, introduces the central characters, the Inconsolable and Anfitriona, and the poems switch between their two voices as well as other narrating perspectives. Anfitriona hosts a party at her house, the Mystic Mansion, where the Inconsolable attends and confesses his love to her. Later, Anfitriona commits suicide, some thieves enter the party, and the Inconsolable becomes mad with grief. With a fiery cadence, the book’s hauntingly strange structure illustrates the tension between two lovers, between life and death, and between the self and the exterior. darío writes: “To occupy space is to negotiate with the void. / The wall needs a rest from my laughter; I know, / that crack is sick of me.” Feast, fright showcases the dense yet lucid abundance of darío’s style and his aptitude for experimenting with form. His whimsical sense of humor interplays with a peculiar and romantic ambiance: “the sneeze you drowned behind the ivy swarm to avoid being seen by that language painter who would give an arm and a leg to do your portrait seemed to turn into the first date’s yawn.” darío transfigures verbs to produce uncanny imagery while flirting with mortality through the “drowning” of a sneeze, the voluntary dismemberment of an admirer. Meaning is often obscured, blended up like pigments in paint.
The second volume, airsickness, is predominately a proliferation of letters sandwiched between a handful of poems. darío once told Schluter that the title airsickness refers to the isolation we live in under late capitalism, in which the very air we breathe is not only poisonous but carries the cellular and wifi waves that sever the connections between humans as animals. In this volume, the Inconsolable has become loquacious in his grief, furiously writing to his family, friends, and an Architect (God?) detailing his struggles to make sense of the world after Anfitriona’s suicide. Delving further into the relation between interior and exterior, darío writes: “Oh, but only by dying can one achieve nudity. When the spirit leaves the body and disperses into the atmosphere and once again becomes a part of every phenomenon.”
darío posits the interconnectedness of all living things, the dissolution of interiority. The Inconsolable goes on to elucidate an ontology of death: “Something bit me in the river. It hurts, but I don’t mind. Where’d it bite me? In the river. No, I mean, what body part. The river.” Restless in his grief, the Inconsolable transforms himself into a body of water, a symbol of life as well as a gateway to the afterlife. Like an exercise in dreaming, the feeling of pain is itself a sign of wakefulness, of being alive and conscious. It’s a subtle reminder of darío’s experience of pain while battling a terminal illness, and his passion for authentic living.
According to Schluter’s introduction, darío wrote the final book, asolar (raze), during a period of intensive medical intervention with multiple operations and chemotherapy. Asolar is narrated from the perspective of Anfitriona, now also referred to as Lantana. Her body decomposes in its grave, but her spirit remains animated. Raze is ethereal and baroque, composed of 5 longer-form poems. Knowing of darío’s terminal condition, these poems read as a way for him to cope with the reality of his own mortality: “I’ve left the places I once filled / so neatly, with defined contours.”
In the midst of ontological inquiries into death, darío’s subtle humor persists. “Gruesome to serve face, to let it fall off. / Had I known / that language persists during the ‘definitive’ stasis / I’d have brought my phone”—a moment that grounds the reader in the here & now with the mentioning of the phone, a technology of isolation masquerading as a medium for connection. Death, to darío, is clearly no ending but a radical transformation of spirit and matter: “One verb no longer contains another and, dismantled, / the beginning returns to void: / source and motive of every pulse,” he writes. darío’s language is a medium to sculpt reality, to create new meanings, to transmute the reader’s expectations and expand the utility of language.
Lantana: or the indissoluble exhalation is a rapturous text ripe with clever wordplay and an irreverent, effusive humor. The first of darío’s Spanish poetry to be translated into English, Lantana is an impressive experiment with form. At times traditional, his style is cunning and unique, combining the imagination of a child with the infectious yearning of early adulthood. Lantana longs for life beyond death, a life that transcends the deplorable conditions of working-class modernity, of being discarded by the powerful in rapidly unlivable cities.