Southernmost: Sonnets

by Leo Boix

'Vivid ... A memoir of queer love, loss and migration … dazzling’ Karen McCarthy Woolf, author of Top Doll

'It all happened a long time ago, no one now remembers this story
let me tell you how it all happened, how we turned unholy.'

In Southernmost, Leo Boix takes us on a spellbinding voyage through time and imagination, from the Argentina of his birth – ‘the end of the world, the antipode’ – to a new life in England.

Unearthing an old grief, the poet embarks on a glittering, encyclopaedic exploration of his own past and the Latin America he left a continent haunted by the Europeans who once fixed their telescopes on its shores.

Southernmost reveals truths hidden in plain colonialism’s violent legacies; dissidents disappeared by the junta; a young mother’s mysterious decline; the clarifying sexuality of a boy whose father can’t bear to acknowledge it. At the same time, it tells a story – as sonnets have often done – about love, through Boix’s intimate and original evocation of gay marriage. Restlessly intelligent, intoxicated by Latin America’s landscapes and rich folklore, this virtuosic net of sonnets offers a glimpse of our world’s interconnecting threads.

'In this thrilling collection of sonnets, Leo Boix maps a personal geography out of dynamic encounters between the Old World and the New' Chloe Aridjis, author of Sea Monsters

'As sinuous and expansive as the ocean between us’ Urayoán Noel, author of Transversal

Genres: Poetry

126 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 18, 2025

Reviews

[Andrew H · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are finely crafted sonnets, fresh, sparkling, and original. The book contrasts personal and private history: Argentinian history and colonialism versus Voix's emigration, as an Argentinian, to the UK. In other words, Europe's place in Argentina and an Argentinian's place in Europe. Boix is at his best when writing about the son-mother bond, the place where personal and impersonal life meets and influence one another. All in all, a poetry book of the highest calibre.

[W.S. Luk · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Years later, in another country, I'll be an interpreter/who tries to render things from one world to another."

I don't usually like sonnets. They're rigidly metrical, there's a massive historical legacy of sonnet-writing for each writer to contend with, and a lot of the time they're just plain stuffy. But despite my apprehension at picking up this sonnet collection, SOUTHERNMOST is a wonderfully conceived sequence of poems. Boix discards conventional iambic pentameter, keeping only the rhyme scheme of a Shakespearian sonnet, which brings an unconventionally conversational and prosaic touch to these sonnets (you often hear about prose that feels poetic; the reverse is rare). He quotes from unconventional sources (the writings of Charles Darwin, museum plaques, lists of Latin names), reshaping them into poetic matter.

These stylistic flourishes allow Boix to make the sonnet form his own, its regularity playing against the personal stories of queer life and Latin American history that he unfolds. Infused with influences from South American surrealist art and magical-realist storytelling, these poems unobtrusively put a new twist on a poetic tradition I thought I knew.

[Lauren Phillips · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of sonnets that read like a novel. They made me miss South America, and England, but also made me hopeful in a quiet sort of way about the way things stay the same even when they feel chaotic.