These poems are lovely and strong and important, but I feel like I read them with the wrong framework. I would have loved to study these in a university classroom as opposed to on an e-reader--it felt too casual.

Leon Salvatierra's To the North/Al Norte offers a powerful view of the lived reality of migrating from Central America (Nicaragua to be specific) to the U.S. While these poems are unabashedly autobiographical, they also are painting a larger picture of the pressures underlying this migration, life in a new nation, and the displacement migrants encounter when returning to what once was home. Salvatierra's poetic voice is clear and direct. He makes constructive use of repetition with minor variations to broaden his topics as he explores them. Having a bilingual edition of this groups of poems is blessing. The translations are adept, but it's also rewarding to move between translation and original, pondering their nuances.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own.

A promising voice in the world of poetry in my Nicaragua, a country where "de poetas y locos, todos tenemos u poco" (we all have a little bit of poets and crazy people).
Obviously, this author cannot be compared to Rubén Darío, but in his favor it can be said that his work has an interesting metric in which the prose seems like poetry and the poetry is, sometimes, almost prose.
This book was originally published in 2012 by the Editorial Universitaria of the University of Nicaragua and now the University of Nevada Press brings us a dual language edition.
I thank the author, the University of Nevada Press, and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this story. The opinion I have expressed above is based solely on what I think of this book.

“To the North/Al norte” – Leon Salvatierra (translated from Spanish by the author and Javier O Muerta)

I was drawn to this because I noticed it was a bilingual book, Spanish and English, before realising that it was a poetry collection – yet again, the genre I really struggled to read and review haha.

Happily, it turned out that I really got caught up in this collection of poetry, not least because of the story of the author himself. Salvatierra is a Nicaraguan poet and professor who fled civil war in the 1908s as a teenager and was forced ‘al norte’ to seek asylum in the United States.

“The accented syllable in my name had to take the blow: Léon”

After 11 long years, Salvatierra achieved naturalised citizen status, and the poems and prose in this book deal with the feelings and upheaval of his early life, from his father’s infidelity and early death of alcoholism, to feeling of exile and outsiderness in various US schools, struggling to learn English and find a place in a new home.

While perhaps lacking any stylistic invention, the emotional heft of the collection makes up for it. Salvatierra has a good handle on vivid imagery and a story that lends itself to such, and the range of ideas and topics covered in the collection is impressive, at least to a poetry novice such as myself.

If you’re interested in the immigrant experience in America, then Salvatierra is a voice worth listening to, and this collection is worth seeking out. Published 8th of November by University of Nevada Press, my thanks to them and @netgalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.