Translated from the Spanish by Jaime Manrique and Dean Kostos.
Jaime Manrique is a novelist, poet, and essayist. His books include Tarzan, My Body, Christopher Columbus (Painted Leaf Press, 2001), Eminent Maricones (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002) and Latin Moon in Manhattan (St. Martin’s Press, 1993). Among his honors are Columbia’s National Poetry Award and a Guggenheim fellowship. He is an associate professor in the MFA at Columbia University.
Dean Kostos is the author of The Sentence That Ends with a Comma (Painted Leaf Press, 1999) and Celestial Rust (Red Dust, 1995) and the coeditor of Mama’s Boy (Painted Leaf Press, 2000). His poems have appeared in Boulevard, Chelsea, Rattapallax, and Southwest Review. His translations from the modern Greek have appeared in Barrow Street and elsewhere.
—Born in 1945, Raul Gomez Jattin was a leading Colombian poet who also worked as an actor and a director. At the time of his suicide in 1996, he was living as a homeless person.