The University of Arizona Press
Date: Sunday, June 14, 2026
Time: 5 p.m., BST
Place: Frobisher Auditorium, Level 4, Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London
Poets Manuel Iris, author of The Whole Earth Is a Garden of Monsters / Toda la tierra es un jardín de monstruos and Leo Boix, author of Southernmost: Sonnets, will read from their latest collections and be in conversation in London on June 14. The event is presented alongside Delcy Morelos’ major commission in The Barbican’s Sculpture Court.
Set in dialogue with Morelos’ immersive installation where soil, scent, and memory converge, this event invites movement between land and language, body and voice. Like Morelos’ work, which reclaims the earth as a site of history, healing, and resistance, Leo Boix and Manuel Iris write from perspectives that blur the boundaries between the personal and the communal.
Iris traces migration, fire, and survival through layered temporalities in which myth, ecology, and human experience intertwine. Boix’s poetry, rooted in queer identity and diasporic experience, explores displacement and belonging with a sensuous, elemental lyricism.
The event is free and open to the public; reserve a free ticket here.
About the book:
This award-winning bilingual collection intertwines the lives of a Renaissance painter and a modern migrant worker, offering a fresh perspective on art and migration.
In this highly imaginative work, 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, run in parallel as they mirror each other across languages, time, and continents.
By comparing and at times intertwining these two poetic narratives, 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.
Written in simple, sharp language, the book employs surprising imagery and a novel structure to blur the boundaries between reality and fiction, while examining the intricacies of the human condition—from the life of Saint Anthony to the violent acts of narcos across Central America and the U.S.-Mexico border. With formal sophistication and philosophical depth, this work enriches the tradition of poetry about both migration and art, contributing to the literary heritage of Mexico and the United States over the past several decades.
