num_pages: 144
description: Xavier Villaurrutia was one of the very few Latin American writers in the first half of this century who was openly homosexual—an important Mexican poet who wrote, essentially, one book, Nostalgia for Death, translated here for the first time by Eliot Weinberger. As 1990 Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz makes clear in his book-length study, Hieroglyphs of Desire (translated by Esther Allen), Villaurrutia is a major poet of desire whose beloved is the death we live each day. His poems define life between the nocturnal and diurnal and have taken on added poignancy as uncanny prophecies of individual lives in the age of the AIDS epidemic.
language: English
title: Nostalgia for Death & Hieroglyphs of Desire
titlecomplete: Nostalgia for Death & Hieroglyphs of Desire
genres: Literature, Classics, Spanish Literature, Fiction, Poetry
ratings_count: 387
publisher: Copper Canyon Press