Framing Roberto Bolano: Poetry, Fiction, Literary History, Politics

Poetry, fiction, literary history, and politics. These four cornerstone concerns of Roberto Bolano’s work have established him as a representative, generational figure in not only Chile, Mexico, and Spain, the three principal locations of his life and work, but throughout Europe and the Americas, increasingly on a global scale. At the heart of Bolano’s ‘poemas-novela’, his poet- and poetry-centered novels, is the history and legacy of the prose poem. Challenging the policing of boundaries between verse and prose, poetry and fiction, the literary and the non-literary, the aesthetic and the political, his prose poem novels offer a sustained literary history by other means, a pivotal intervention that restores poetry and literature to full capacity. Framing Roberto Bolano is one of the first books to trace the full arc and development of Bolano’s work from the beginning to the end of his career.