Empire of Dreams

First edition in English. 8vo. Pp. xxi-[xxiv], 220, [4 (blank)]. Navy buckram, stamped in copper gilt to spine; brick-red endpapers. Jacket illustration – Details from 'Paris', gouache by Jorge Zeno.

Translated by Tess O'Dwyer, who won the 1991 Columbia University Translation Centre Award. With an Introduction by Alicia Ostriker and a Translator's Note.

An epic length sequence of poems originally published in 1988 in Spain as El imperio de los sueños. Here combined with her first two poetry collections, all composed from 1980 to 1986, and comprising the first volume of the Yale Library of World Literature in Translation.

Written in a hybrid of genres – prose poetry, drama, musical theatre, manifesto, gossip, autobiography, diary, literary theory, and antinovel – and dealing with issues of performance, gender ambiguity, and marginality, it dramatises the Latin American immigrant's magnetic pull towards the "Big Apple". "An 'in-your-face assertion' of the vitality of Latino culture in the US." –New York Daily News