"Far from an innocent cultural trifle, poetry contributes to the fundamental cultural debates of our time. With this volume, Burns likewise contributes to the fundamental cultural debate of our time, situating and imagining the poet at the center of the debate, rather than at the periphery. Foremost in these debates is the impact of five 5 “-scapes,” identified by Burns, from which our generation cannot escape: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes. ... By carefully evaluating each poet’s cultural place and applying his special talent for accurate translation of Spanish texts, John Burns presents a clear and detailed picture of the most influential contemporary Hispanic poets of the current global and digital age." —Rocky Mountain Review
"John Burns’ study of Hispanic poetry from Chile, Mexico, and Spain employs a cultural studies approach in its analysis of recent poetic production in Spanish. It is innovative in its transatlantic scope, and is a valuable contribution to attempts to reconsider the role and status of the poet in globalized-— and especially neoliberal-—socioeconomic context ... And while the poets studied in this book demonstrate varied lived and literary responses to globalization, the Internet, and other technological innovations, the contribution of this book lies precisely in the fine readings of each Latin American or Spanish artist’s individual, nuanced responses to these larger socio-economic realities." —A contra corriente
"This is an excellent book on a very interesting topic. It is a well-conceived, well-researched, and well-written study covering a number of very significant poets in the Spanish-speaking world. Good scholarly books on poetry are rare. Good books on Hispanic poetry, transatlantic in content, and with a superb combination of textual analysis and theoretical reflection are even rarer, and this one belongs to the latter category. This book will have a significant impact in several fields of study, from, or course, Hispanism, to Global, Transatlantic and Literary Studies in general. The selection of exemplary texts and authors (whether canonical or less-known poets) is one of the strengths of this book. It will refresh the critical corpus on well-established names within Chilean, Spanish or Mexican American letters (Zurita, Panero, Gómez-Peña, and, to some extent, García Montero) and add to the critical literature on less-studied authors (Vicuña, Tomasa Rivera, Herrera). Praiseworthy is also how these poets are grouped or isolated in their respective chapters and how their production is then linked to the specific questions posed, from the combination of madness, the idea of the 'national' poet and neoliberalism, to the intriguing possibility of identifying a ‘lyrical globalized theory.’ The work on the glocal and on a ‘globalized indigenism’ completes this very important and suggestive study of the lyric genre as it is conceived, produced and circulated nowadays in the Spanish-speaking world. Stylistically, the author has done a superb job. This is academic prose in which sophistication is not purchased at the expense of clarity. Always elegant and effective, the scholarly writing in fact displays frequent moments of brilliance; for example, the way pathology, poetry and neoliberalism are connected or how hybridity is discussed. This book is a significant contribution to the field.” – Juan Egea, Professor of Spanish, University of Wisconsin-Madison
