Dinner at Las Heras

Dinner at Las Heras is a bittersweet lovesong to a broken world, a geographical and psychological cartography spanning cityscapes and tangled internal terrain. The book is a reference to the first section of Luciana Jazmín Coronado's Catacombs, winner of the Premio Hispanoamericano de la Poesía de San Salvador. In it, each section or "catacomb" is named for an address in Buenos Aires where the poet spent a fragment of her childhood. From Las Heras 3847 (where she lived with her father and stepmother), to Arengreen 1347 (her grandparents' and mother's home), to Calle Cero (or "Zero Street," where she ends her first relationship and loses her little brother), Catacombs and Dinner at Las Heras are deeply personal explorations of past and present. With both real and metaphorical needle and thread, Coronado creates a tapestry from Las Heras that is dystopian yet optimistic, where children raise themselves and sprout from the rubble of adult disillusionment. Here, the dead are never dead, gardens speak, and ravenous flowers wait under the dinner table.