What do you think?
Rate this book
Southernmost: Sonnets
'It all happened long time ago, no one now remembers this story
let me tell you how it all happened, how once 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 the Latin America he left a journey through personal memory into a continent’s past, haunted by the Europeans who once fixed their telescopes on its shores. Helping us ‘see faces history can’t reach’, Southernmost reveals truths hidden in plain the devastation of indigenous peoples and their lands; dissidents disappeared by the junta; a mother’s concealed cancer diagnosis; the clarifying sexuality of a boy whose father can’t bear to acknowledge it.
Restlessly intelligent, tender in their evocation of gay intimacy, migration, and the natural world, this virtuosic net of sonnets captures a glimpse of our world’s interconnecting threads.
'And I realised I couldn’t go on travelling – I had to stop my tour;
that there was no El Dorado; their vast skies were also ours.
Years later, in another country, I was also an interpreter
who tried to render things from one world to another.
When I finally wake up I’m always at a loss. Where am I?
I’m back home, of course. Still, outside, the strangest sky.'
let me tell you how it all happened, how once 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 the Latin America he left a journey through personal memory into a continent’s past, haunted by the Europeans who once fixed their telescopes on its shores. Helping us ‘see faces history can’t reach’, Southernmost reveals truths hidden in plain the devastation of indigenous peoples and their lands; dissidents disappeared by the junta; a mother’s concealed cancer diagnosis; the clarifying sexuality of a boy whose father can’t bear to acknowledge it.
Restlessly intelligent, tender in their evocation of gay intimacy, migration, and the natural world, this virtuosic net of sonnets captures a glimpse of our world’s interconnecting threads.
'And I realised I couldn’t go on travelling – I had to stop my tour;
that there was no El Dorado; their vast skies were also ours.
Years later, in another country, I was also an interpreter
who tried to render things from one world to another.
When I finally wake up I’m always at a loss. Where am I?
I’m back home, of course. Still, outside, the strangest sky.'
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
First published November 18, 2025
5 people are currently reading
37 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 30, 2025
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.
July 19, 2025
"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.
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.
December 26, 2025
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.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews