February 17, 2026

The Whole Earth Is a Garden of Monsters / Toda la tierra es un jardín de monstruos by Manuel Iris intertwines the lives of the northern Renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch (1450–1516) and an imagined contemporary migrant worker named Juan Coyoc, later known as Juan Domínguez. These two figures run in parallel, mirroring each other across languages, time, and continents. This imaginative, boundary-blurring collection was selected as the winner of the 2025 Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets.

By comparing and at times intertwining the two poetic narratives of Bosch and Coyoc/Domínguez, the book explores themes of art, migration, narco-violence, family, spirituality, and the idea that every human being represents all humanity at any moment in history. Both Hieronymus Bosch and Juan Domínguez become relatable and intimate figures, part of our own story.

Today, Iris answers five questions about his work.

Your title is a reference to Hieronymus Bosch’s painting, “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” How did you become interested in this painting?

I do not remember how old I was exactly when I was first exposed to a reproduction of The Garden of Earthly Delights. It was maybe an illustration in a book, or a small picture in the pages of an encyclopedia, perhaps. I do know that I was not an adolescent yet, and that those images have haunted me for most of my life. Not only the third panel, the one that represents hell, but the whole painting. I was and still am in awe of how everything in the painting, every creature, seems to be at the same time possible and impossible. I always had the impression that those images were a sort of portrait of humanity, of the human condition. Like any great work of art, this painting is a confession, a shared secret, the footprint of an epiphany. My later love for surrealist art might be the result of Bosch’s influence in my sensibility from an early age.

However, it was only in the last five or six years that I became sort of obsessed with researching Bosch’s life and his complete works.

Can you tell us about the process of translating this book, and working alongside Kevin McHugh who you call your “cotranslator”?

I was born in the Yucatan Peninsula, in Mexico. I became a writer there. During my formative years, I saw that the indigenous poets of the Yucatan, great Mayan poets, were almost all the time their own translators into Spanish. This duality author/translator was and still is the result of a very practical need: if they were to wait for a translator to appear, their work might never be translated, or the publication in Spanish would be seriously delayed or postponed. They became their own translators out of a need to be read in the dominant language of the place they lived.

My situation as a Spanish-speaking poet in the U.S. shares at least one similarity with that of the Mayan poets: if I were to wait for a translator for each one of my books, this very book wouldn’t yet exist. I started translating myself when I decided I wanted to become a U.S. poet who could be read by as many people as possible.

However, I was not aware of the depth of transformation I, as a poet, would experience as a result of becoming my own translator. Now, translating is part of my editing process. What I mean is that sometimes I prefer what is happening in the English version of my poems, and then I go back and revise the Spanish original to match the spirit of the translation. But now, after making two-way changes, which poem is the original one?

My translations of my own poems are not literal, nor too faithful to the original words. They are, however, very faithful to the music and spirit of the poems in Spanish. I allow myself to change things, words, to better fit the feeling of the original poem.

As a translator of my own work, I pursue the spirit of the poems more than I chase linguistic equivalencies. Sometimes I need help sharpening the music of the English poems, and that is where Kevin McHugh comes in. He is the owner of a gifted poetic ear. His sensitivity to the music turning into words and vice versa, is outstanding. He has helped me shape the music (and music is meaning) of the poems in this book, and other books of mine. He is, indeed, a cotranslator of my work. He has served as a guardian of my music when I try to sing English, in a sense.

There are numerous instances of mirroring in this book: Bosch and Juan Coyoc; poems paired with the same title; and even the translation itself, presented first in English and again in Spanish. How do you think about these acts of mirroring and doubling?

One of my constant creative obsessions is the belief that every thing, every body, is a repetition of something else. There is nothing new under the sun. However, at the same time, every face, every object, every experience is unique, original. This duality, for me, affirms our (very temporal, futile) identity and, at the same time, affirms our belonging to the universe, to eternity. I do believe that every single person is a representation of all humankind.

This is maybe why I devised a poetic experiment that emphasizes the similarities between the two seemingly distant characters you mentioned: Hieronymus Bosch and Juan Coyoc (later known as Juan Domínguez), which is an imagined contemporary migrant worker. Their two narrative threads, one rooted in history, the other in fiction, unfold in parallel as “mirror poems”, intersecting or even complementing each other.

This project is the most structurally ambitious I have attempted so far, but that obsession of mine has appeared in my prior poems and books. The mirroring of poems and themes is a direct result of such obsession.

As the former poet laureate of Cincinnati, what were some highlights from your time in that role?

Cincinnati is a generous, artistic city. It is full of poets and creatives of every kind. When I became the city’s poet laureate, I wasn’t really connected to much of the city’s cultural and literary life, but people reached out and included me. I made friends that I will forever hold dear in my heart. Those personal connections are the most important part of my tenure, if I speak from an intimate perspective.

But there was also the public work. I organized poetry readings in non-traditional spaces like laundromats, school kitchens, non-profits, and parking lots. However, the real highlight of my tenure was the result of a struggle: I helped the role survive after the pandemic, when it was in danger of losing support and disappearing. I started the conversations between the city of Cincinnati and the Mercantile Library to sponsor the poet Laureate position together. That, I believe, became my more lasting and important achievement, my gift for this city that has given me so much: securing the existence of Cincinnati’s poet Laureateships for the foreseeable future.

What are you working on now?

I am working on a book that blends poems, essays, and letters. I have no rush.

Manuel Iris is a Mexican-born American poet who has served as poet laureate of Cincinnati, Ohio, writer-in-residence at the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library, and writer-in-residence at Thomas More University. In 2021, he was named a member of the National System of Art Creators of Mexico. Iris is the author of five poetry collections, published in several countries. He has received national and international recognition for his poetic work.

January 22, 2026

Today we share a poetry playlist by Logan Phillips, author of Reckon, featuring songs that illuminate the author’s creative process.

In Reckon, artist Logan Phillips returns to the fabled town to face the history he was raised on as a boy—gunfights, outlaws, and Hollywood cowboys—for a new, personal confrontation with the West’s foundational mythology. This hybrid memoir also explores sexuality, masculinity, parenting, and what it means to love a land rife with contradiction and “slathered in murder.”

As innovative as it is moving, this memoir is constructed of essays, photography, poetry, newspaper clippings from the Tombstone Epitaph Local Edition, and of course, movie screenplays. As he writes the characters of his past––including Youngfather and Teenme––Phillips finds the real history to be much more complex than the stories he was told. This is Tombstone in the 1980s and 90s, a century after the West’s most famous gunfight––a fifteen-second event still performed every day in historical reenactments––where Phillips’s father works as a historical exhibit designer at the Courthouse Museum and his uncle as a stuntman at Old Tucson Studios. 

Read (and listen along with) Phillips’ playlist below:

I’m so lucky to have inherited a love of music from my parents, who filled my childhood with albums across the shifting formats of the era: vinyl to cassette to CD to vinyl again, with a couple inexplicable 8-tracks lurking around. I’ve spent many of my adult years working as a DJ, still in love with how music brings us together. But writing requires endless hours of solitude, so this playlist turns to ambient/drone/African blues/doom metal, especially the records that were in heavy rotation during the writing of Reckon.

(Speaking of music formats, I’ll briefly point out that there’s probably no ethical way to have access to all music ever recorded for $11.99 a month, especially when the corporation selling the subscription has the poor practices and the dubious morals of Spotify or the other corporations eviscerating the arts economy. Where possible, links in this playlist point to Bandcamp, which is the platform I use, and probably the best online option for musicians trying to survive and make art in 2026.)

Track #1: “Foreign Smokes,” BCMC. 2023.
That cold, liminal air under the first gray-blue of dawn. While writing Reckon I started my days with a song like this one (“Birds” by SUSS is another): a song still loose in mind, with glimpses of dreams, elided pasts, possible futures.

Track #2: “Sundown,” Barn Owl. 2010.
The window of my study faces east, and I write through the dawn hours. Though this track is called “Sundown,” it will always remind me of the inflection point in the morning ritual: sun staring into my eyes, page-screen blurred, fully lost in the poem-memory-vision, volume extremely loud. Hard to pick a single song off “Ancestral Star” since I always let the whole record run—“Sundown” is the opening—“Awakening” might be the actual key cut.

Track #3: “WZN#3,” 75 Dollar Bill. 2019.
Jim Simmerman, one of my early poetry mentors, told me in 2003 that “90% of what is interesting about repetition is variation.” Maybe that means the point of a pattern is to break it, setting up an expectation in order to have the chance to subvert it. The movement of this song reminds me of the arc of a writing session—an arrhythmic riffing gathering sounds before coalescing around a relentless beat and riding that rhythm wherever it may take us—into chaos and back again, over and over and over, dizzy.

Track #4: “Jbit Aala Khiam,” Tapan Meets Génération Taragalte. 2019.
Picking up where the 75 Dollar Bill left off (like any DJ transition worth the salt), this record is a one-off collab between a Moroccan/Touareg desert blues group and Serbian electronic producer. I’m struck by how deserts can sound so similar, regardless of hemisphere. Amps cranked, bouncing among the canyon walls or lost out to the swirling horizon. I get lost in here, a necessary condition for the writing of poetry.

Track #5: “Jerusalem, Part 1,” Sleep. 1996.
No way around it—there’s going to be either Earth or Sleep on this playlist. And if it’s not Sleep’s album-length alternative take “Dopesmoker,” it’s this one. If metal isn’t your thing, substitute with Pixies “Silver” (silver being Tombstone’s raison d’etre)—but on repeat no less than five times in a row, please. In any case, no honest look at “The American West” can avoid seeing the violence—not just the atomized, romanticized individual gunfighter—but the systemic grind of genocide and its engine: capitalism. It’s dark, especially knowing that it touches my family’s history, as it touches everyone alive today in one way or another. There’s no healing without first looking at the wound: understanding its depths, contours and causes. One part of Reckon is my attempt to not look away from the violence that has benefited me. Doom metal helps me sustain the gaze.

Bonus Tracks:

“Hours in the Evening,” Sarah Davachi. 2018.
Then this distortion falls away and we’re left with the hum of the rocks under a forgiving winter sun. I might have spent more hours listening to Davachi—an incredibly prolific Canadian composer—than any other single artist in the last few years. Bitchin’ Bajas would be a close second. There’s something about drone music that takes me out of time: of course there’s no beat (time measure) but I mean the voice of the rocks, the rush of the blood, throbbing ebb of a little lifetime.

“Abusey Junction,” KOKOROKO. 2019.
There’s so much grief inherent in gazing through the concentric circles of time. Not only when looking at capital ‘H’ History, but even when feeling into personal memories, the ephemeral beauty of them. The word nostalgia has at its (ancient Greek) root the longing to return home, an impossible, often dislocated desire. This cut hits deep for me. I can never truly return to the early, quiet bliss, fully held by love and land—and it may never have existed quite as I remember it anyway. So, what’s to do other than carry it deep down, tending and honoring love’s small flame without asking too much of it, handwriting a hearth of poems where others might catch glimpses from time to time, doing my best to pass it to the children in my life.

Logan Phillips is a poet and cultural worker based in Tucson, Arizona (traditional lands of the Tohono O’odham). He is author of Sonoran Strange, alongside numerous poetry chapbooks and art books, including the NoVoGRAFíAS series (2009–present). A seasoned performer and collaborator, Phillips has toured his work internationally, working on a wide range of arts, education, and land-based projects. He completed an MFA at the University of Arizona. www.dirtyverbs.com.