Whole Earth Is a Garden of Monsters / Toda La Tierra Es Un Jardín De Monstruos

Manuel Iris is a Mexican-born American poet who has served as poet laureate of Cincinnati, Ohio. Iris is the author of five poetry collections, including The Disguises of Fire [Los disfraces del fuego].Kevin C. McHugh is book editor and former writer and editor for international branding studios. He taught writing for thirty-one years.

“The Whole Earth Is a Garden of Monsters [is] an imaginative, earnest, and timely depiction of the casualties of mass migrations to the United States from Latin America. There is an intriguing parallel between two main characters, Juan DomÍnguez, migrant of fire, and Hieronymus Bosch, portraitist of fire, whose early lives are marked by catastrophic fire from which they are born into new names, new ways, new lives. Their labor is noticed, but their lives go unwatched except by the creatures of the night, the owls. [. . .] Beautiful! The translation achieves fluidity and transparency, a dynamic duo of qualities that make for an engaging experience.”—Giannina Braschi, author of Putinoika “In this dual-language collection, Manuel Iris boldly mirrors the lives of painter Hieronymus Bosch and migrant worker Juan Coyoc, an exchange that reveals how violence lingers in body and memory across time. Iris writes of displacement and survival with an aching lyric clarity, exploring where personal history meets collective grief.”—JosÉ Angel Araguz, author of Rotura “Every era feeds on times that have been lost in obscurity, until, say, a poem or a painting sheds light upon them and we discover again what links us to the people living in the past, like the ones who saw in their demons the very concrete terrors of today. This is the entanglement Manuel Iris reveals between the monsters of Hieronymus Bosch and the ones populating the world of our Juan DomÍnguez.”—Yuri Herrera, author of Signs Preceding the End of the World “Infused with erudition and formal rigor, The Whole Earth Is a Garden of Monsters constitutes an innovative approach to think about migration and history through poetry and shows Manuel Iris as powerful witness and chronicler of the ways in which language, history, art, and memory continue to be central to our understanding of the human condition.”—Ignacio M. SÁnchez Prado, Jarvis Thurston and Mona Van Duyn Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis