Troubled Fault Lines
A conversation between Leo Boix and Patrick Romero McCafferty
Patrick Romero McCafferty, Leo Boix
Patrick Romero McCafferty: Congrats on the publication of Southernmost: Sonnets, Leo. The book’s many journeys display the narrative powers of a traditional form with so much skill. The sonnet sequence is designed to address the beloved, and the worldliness of that address grabbed me from the first. Through that worldliness love becomes a voyage of its own, in a way. Conversely, although the poems articulate the struggles of being an immigrant very sensitively, I was left feeling there was something romantic about the portrayal of migration too. Does that ring true?
Leo Boix: Migration sneaks into everything I write, whether I mean it to or not. My family tree is full of departures: grandparents leaving southern Europe for Argentina, me leaving Argentina for England, my partner’s family fleeing Eastern Europe. If you shake the tree, passports fall out. Movement feels almost hereditary – an instinct as much as a choice – and so it naturally threads itself through my work.
In Southernmost, migration and love are entwined in unexpected ways. The sonnet becomes a kind of vessel for both – carrying heartbreak, arrival, tenderness, humour, and all the small catastrophes and miracles that come with leaving one place and learning to inhabit another. In the first section of the book, I revisit my family’s history, especially my mother’s untimely illness and my childhood in Buenos Aires. As the book widens, I follow the arc of my own migration to England and the strangeness of forming a life somewhere new, including my relationship with my partner, the artist Pablo Bronstein.
Compared to my last book, Ballad of a Happy Immigrant, which leans more toward memoir, this book treats migration as its own kind of romance. There’s suffering in it, of course – loss, disorientation, that sense of being perpetually out of frame – but also exhilaration and a surprising intimacy. Alongside the personal poems, the book is interspersed with historical narratives of exploration, exploitation, and postcolonial violence, because migration isn’t only private, it’s political and collective, part of a much older story we’re all still inside. Language itself becomes a kind of journey, moving between Spanish, English, and Spanglish – sometimes deliberately, sometimes because that’s simply how my mind travels.
One sonnet ends in a dream: my parents meeting me at the Buenos Aires airport. It’s impossible – my mother died when I was thirteen – but the dream captures that surreal tenderness of displacement, the feeling of being at home and lost at once. For me, that’s what migration often is: a continuous blending of the real and the imagined, the remembered and the reinvented, and poetry becomes the space where those contradictions can live together without having to resolve themselves.
Patrick, when I reread Glass Knot Sun, I was struck by how your poems shift between Mexico, Scotland, and the landscapes that lie between them, which are often in states of fracture or drift. ‘A Doorway Between Explosions’ for instance opens in Mexico City after the San Juanico disaster, amidst cracked lintels, a fallout dawn, and an avocado held like a small shield – a moment steeped in catastrophe, collective memory, and a specific sense of place.
In my own work, particularly in Southernmost, I’ve been interested in how place can unsettle or remake identity; how stepping into a new geography can alter one’s sense of self, or how returning to a familiar one can expose a fault line you didn’t know was there. Sometimes, a place functions as home, sometimes as exile, and sometimes as a kind of transitional ground where old selves slip and new ones haven’t yet found form. I wonder how landscape operates for you in Glass Knot Sun. Do these shifting geographies – the Mexican Pacific, the Scottish north, the borderlands and in-between terrains – act as sites of belonging, dislocation, labour, memory?
PRM: Ah, thank you for asking. Yeah, fracture and drift are apt, I would say. Like you, I’m conscious of the symbolic force a place can have and how that force can turn on a penny. But Glass Knot Sun is a bit quiet on the real places that are important to me in the ways you describe. There’s no Edinburgh in there, for example, which is where I’ve lived most of my life. There are no representations of the kitchen tables I’ve felt most at home at, or my grandparents’ garden in Tepoztlan. So something else must be happening. Thinking about how I set about writing a poem, it occurs to me that the feeling of drift you refer to might have more to do with rhythm than geography itself; the rhythm of journeys, and maybe the overarching rhythm of a visit to somewhere new and impressive, with an arrival, a period of residence, and a departure. ‘A Doorway Between Explosions’ is one of the small handful in the pamphlet that describe a specific place and it’s set long before I was born. I tend to favour sound over sight in general, so I kind of give metre priority in the moment of composition without noticing: imagining how the drifting motion of travel feels, whether on foot or by some other means, sometimes helps me find a pace that feels natural and hopefully leads the poem to discover its meaning.
When a view or landscape does leave a strong visual impression on me, it dissolves internal tension, meaning I’m left speechless. It’s a beautiful feeling to find you’ve nothing to say but ‘wow’ or ‘yes’ as you look out at the world but of course it’s challenging to write seriously about a frame of mind in which platitudes do the job. On the day, phrases like ‘aye, you cannae beat it, can you?’ or ‘oh, ya beauty’ communicate more than is immediately apparent but they’re poetically insufficient to say the least. The two cartoon poems in the pamphlet, ‘Espiritu Santo with Snorkeller, 2017’ and ‘Sgurr Alidair with Kayaker, Dusk’ take landscape directly as their subject in an attempt to find new tones precisely in that speechlessness (they don’t have any words in them). There’s a great lineage of concrete poets who challenge the sentimental gloss the Scottish landscape has been subjected to with flare and wit. Maybe working in-situ like Finlay makes a poet extra aware of the mass of a poem relative to the place it corresponds to.
I know this might be moving the goal posts a bit but landscape to me is also all about property, and when I think about the beauty of land, I’m simultaneously conscious of feudal deeds, greed, entitlement, and the lost commons. I love bothies but far too much of Scotland’s land belongs to the Lego guy and the lairds for us to kid ourselves that we really have the right to roam. Our urban landscape is arguably worse: a warren of second, third, tenth homes, and companies within companies registered to London addresses or tax havens all over the world. Meanwhile in Mexico, rural communities are still being ethnically cleansed to make way for mining carried out by companies from the Global North, whilst cartels replace corn fields with poppies. I suppose these could be seen as the fractures beneath the places depicted in the pamphlet. Issues whose colonial and commercial origins concern us both, I think.
I’m curious how you’d define that concern yourself and how it affects your other literary work. Your column in The Morning Star, ‘Letters from Latin America’, is the only source I know of in Britain that publishes regular reviews of new Latin American work. It’s such an important resource. Given the paper’s history and editorial line, do you think of yourself as a communist poet?
LB: ‘Communist poet’ sounds like I should be writing odes to cotton mills in Lancashire! I’ve just moved to Camden, halfway between Keir Starmer and Jeremy Corbyn, which feels symbolic in its own way. The area has a long left-wing history, shaped by decades of Labour councils, the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s, the Ken Livingstone years of municipal socialism, and its position as a hub for radical organising in London.
But to answer your question directly: I wouldn’t call myself a communist poet, mainly because the term suggests a narrowly defined cultural role. Poetry, for me, needs a certain openness – a refusal to be reduced to a single label, however honourable its political lineage. My work is certainly informed by social justice, anti-imperialism, and the histories of the communities I come from and write about. Still, I’m wary of letting a party-political identity stand in for the complexity of that engagement. If anything, I see myself as a socially engaged poet, someone attentive to structures of power and inequality, but also to ambiguity, doubt, and personal experience.
As for the reviewing: writing about Latin American literature in Britain keeps me connected to a broader continental conversation about politics, language, and cultural resistance. It feeds my poetry by reminding me that artistic work doesn’t happen in isolation; it grows out of movements, diasporas, and struggles. Criticism sharpens my sense of context, and poetry allows me to explore those same contexts with more freedom and imagination. The two practices feel less like separate activities than two ways of thinking through the same questions.
Growing up in Argentina under the bloody dictatorship of the Juntas during the ’70s left its mark: neighbours disappeared, histories were erased, people lived under constant fear. Only years later did I learn that one of my neighbours had been a doctor who tortured pregnant women and stole their babies to give to military families. My street was later renamed after the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in memory of the victims. That kind of history doesn’t go away, it comes back in my writing – whether I’m writing about Chile under Pinochet, my aunt’s fear of being taken, or poets like Néstor Perlongher who went into exile for speaking out.
Reviewing for The Morning Star has been a joy. Ten years on, it still feels like stepping into a literary kaleidoscope: one week it’s a post-boom novel by a woman writer, the next it’s poetry in Spanglish, during another it’s a book that reinvents what Latinx resistance looks like in the Trump era. Reading and reviewing keep my poetry alive, sometimes feeding it directly, sometimes in ways I only realise much later.
PRM: Aye, there’s no doubt that much of what we call Latinidad, or a common Latin American culture, stems from experiences and histories like those and it makes a sad kind of sense to think that the solidarity we’re seeing against ICE has a precedent in the struggles of Salvador Allende, Sandino, Castro, even Zapata to an extent, all of whom fought a common imperialist enemy – Western big business. As Galeano said, history doesn’t say goodbye, it just says ‘see you later’. How well do you think the unifying aspects of being Latin American identity are understood in Britain?
LB: When I first arrived in England, I saw myself simply as Argentinian. Later, I began working for a Latin American community newspaper in London called Noticias Latin America, surrounded by Colombians, Venezuelans, Mexicans, and Chileans. We would write about refugees and the priorities of the Latin American community in the UK whilst listening to tango and bachata, sharing empanadas and arepas at lunch, always around a long table. That’s when it clicked: we weren’t just our own nations, we were Latin America. I later taught in schools, mostly in south London, with many Latinx or Latin American students, exploring their heritage and roots through poetry, examining what made them unique, their stories of migration and diaspora, their language, traditions, and culture. We explored multilingualism and different ways they could tell their stories, with a Latin American/Latinx flavour, experimenting with words and imagery, looking at a rich tradition of Latin American writers and poets, from Neruda and Huidobro to Borges, Violeta Parra, and Diana Bellessi.
Since then, Latinidad for me has meant heritage and resistance. In Britain, Latin Americans are often invisible or flattened into stereotypes, but the truth is far richer – Afro-Latino, Indigenous, queer, migrant, mestizo. To claim Latinidad here is to insist on visibility, to speak in our own voices. Mentoring young Latinx writers feels urgent to me. Latinidad isn’t just history; it’s a gift we bring into the cultures where we land.
Family histories, inherited stories, and myths haunt both our books. In Glass Knot Sun, yours often surface through objects – a coin, an avocado, a kayak. How do you see inheritance in your poems?
PRM: As far as writing poetry goes, I like incidental reminders of inheritance best. The other day I got a lift from a cousin of mine I hadn’t seen in fifteen years. We grew up on different continents but in the course of the journey it became obvious we share a range of neuroses, and the hands on the wheel were just like mine only darker. I also found out recently that the last Patrick McCafferty in my family (my great-great-great grandfather) was an illiterate baker, whereas I’m a hyperliterate gluten-intolerant. I relish the new detail in an anecdote retold, the madeleine moments, trinkets that have changed hands many times. What I’m saying is, the wider significance of inheritance is not something I’m consciously thinking about when I sit down to write poems but the infrequent occasions on which it makes itself known spontaneously excite me massively, whether it’s to do with family, language, literature, or culture, and I often set out to write them. The coin and the avocado are examples of this sort of thing. Both contain an implicit invitation to do something creative with the stuff of inheritance. Then again, I also have a short-term memory and an often-unhealthy compulsion to record things, which is a chicken-and-egg conundrum poetry helps alleviate.
The gift I inherited that I feel most acutely aware of on a regular basis is the Spanish language. Leaping from one language to another growing up was natural enough in one sense, but a cause for profound self-consciousness in another. I was always thinking about how the true character of one was invisible to those who spoke the other, and questioning who I could say what to and so on. Bilingual or not, I think most of us live as culturally double or multiple: attuned to the subtleties of address and register – even within one language – and how they alter us from one conversation to another. I’m not saying there was anything unique about my situation but it was formative nevertheless. There are definitely periods where writing feels like a struggle to maintain my side of a figurative conversation with Mexico.
To be totally honest, I disappoint myself in failing to find convincing similarities between the Scotland and the Mexico I’ve known (discounting the effects of globalisation). Sometimes it’s as though they’re diametrically opposed. Look at their histories side by side: as the Mexica were seizing power in the Valley of Mexico for example (in the early 1300s) Robert the Bruce was consolidating the Scottish Crown. As Cortez was building the first Catholic cathedrals in the Americas (in the mid-1500s), John Knox was preaching Calvinism at St Giles. And while Zapata was leading the agrarian revolution (in the 1910s) the old Scots peasantry depicted by Grassic Gibbon were about to be sent to the trenches in Flanders. Those contrasts can be a fruitful if challenging inheritance to write into in itself, but in general I avoid writing inheritance too consciously; it’s just too vast and ever-changing.
Southernmost also contains many, many powerful objects. Sculptures and artefacts especially – a telescope, a butterfly, an upside-down map – do more than represent the history behind a moment in time; their presence, or sometimes the way they’re handled, subverts the historical narrative – in ‘92’ for example. Is there one object that particularly anchors the book for you?
LB: Many of the sonnets begin with small objects – they’re like little trapdoors into larger worlds. I love how something as modest as a map or a trinket can suddenly open up an entire emotional or historical landscape. If I had to choose one object that really anchors the book, it would be América Invertida, the upside-down map of South America by the Uruguayan-Spanish artist Joaquín Torres García. García made the drawing in 1943 after spending more than forty years moving through Spain, France, and the US. When he finally returned to Montevideo, he founded the Escuela del Sur – the School of the South – and América Invertida became its emblem. I’m moved by the fact that he came home after a long, wandering life and immediately set about reframing how artists in the region could imagine themselves. He didn’t design a manifesto full of dense theory; he just flipped the map. It’s such a simple gesture, but it shifts everything: a reminder that orientation is not neutral, that the way we look at the world is a choice.
For me, that image is a kind of quiet rebellion – an insistence on another way of seeing, a refusal to accept inherited hierarchies. It resonates deeply with my own experience of migration and the poems in Southernmost. That sonnet ends with the line ‘Our North is the South’, which for me isn’t just a slogan but a way of living: remembering that where you come from can guide you, even if you’re far from it; that home can recalibrate the compass, giving political and revolutionary agency.
PRM: That’s beautiful. I feel the subversive side of my mother culture in a similar way. It’s fascinating how that revolutionary spirit and the enchantment of European exploration interact in the sonnets. The book opens with a world spilling out of an encyclopaedia and Darwin appears often, turning his nose up at what he sees in Patagonia. Victorian archivist-types haunt both Latin-American and English literature. Why do you think collecting and naming are so central for you?
LB: I’ve always loved encyclopaedias – those vast, unruly attempts to catalogue the world. As a kid in Buenos Aires, I’d spend hours classifying bugs, plants, even rocks, convinced that giving something a name meant I had somehow understood it. Later, of course, Borges arrived to shatter that illusion with his impossible, playful encyclopaedias and bestiaries, which reveal just how arbitrary and culturally determined all systems of order really are.
Darwin is a good example of this tension. He arrives in Patagonia equipped with an entirely Victorian framework – the taxonomies, prejudices, and hierarchies of his age – yet the strangeness of what he encounters keeps slipping through those grids. Humboldt fascinates me for similar reasons: dazzling, meticulous, political, but also caught in the limits of his own Enlightenment gaze. In ‘72’ I describe how, whilst travelling through South America, he encountered the Southern skies, the islands, the people, and wrote lines like, ‘Nothing excites a discoverer more / than the sublime and magnificent nature he is about to explore.’ That mixture of awe, entitlement, and projection tells us as much about Humboldt as it does the landscape or the people he observed.
So for me naming is never neutral. Classification is always a kind of self-portrait; our categories reveal our desires, fears, blind spots: they say more about the classifier than about the butterfly, the island, or the rock. That’s why Victorian archivist-types haunt both Latin American and English literary traditions: they embody the double movement of curiosity and control, discovery and domination. The book keeps circling that tension between order and chaos – the impulse to map and contain the world, and the world’s inevitable refusal to stay within those boundaries. I’m drawn to that space where the catalogue begins to fray, where things resist their labels. That’s where the poems start to breathe.
Many of your poems balance catastrophe with tenderness. I’m thinking of ‘A Doorway Between Explosions’, ‘The Flyers’, and ‘Bycatch’. How do you hold that tension between beauty and threat without letting one overwhelm the other?
PRM: Oof, that’s such a hard question. At the moment, I favour definitions of beauty that frame it as a reconciliation (Keats and Dickinson, say) over those where it’s framed as the result of struggle (Rodin). But for a long time I think I instinctively leaned towards the latter. There’s a lot of violence in the pamphlet. There are times I feel violence to be absolutely quotidian, even though it shouldn’t be. I’m thinking about the kind of combative postures and safety precautions we take on to face reality on a daily basis: the behavioural scripts men learn, the news reports that remind us just how fragile any illusion of collective peace is. I live in Scotland, which is statistically safe as houses, but I’m a Latino as well as a Scot, and I was brought up in the knowledge that violence was real and near at hand. I’ve seen how freak acts of violence have affected loved ones, shattering survivors and those around them. The minor key those poems are in came naturally at the time perhaps as a result of such things and it felt important to let the lines run.
Maybe this is an obvious thing to add, but seeing as you refer to those particular poems, I’d like to make it clear that writing violence (or threat) isn’t a question of ‘bearing witness’ to violent events for me. In my opinion, that phrase is used confusedly in Western poetry at the moment because of how closely we’re able to follow the violence others experience, whether in the neighbourhood or abroad, and therefore feel and write about it. When Carolyn Forché compiled Against Forgetting, her anthology of ‘witness poetry’, she was referring to poetry literally written in extremis, like the vital work emerging from Gaza today. That true sense of the word has to be recognised, respected, and distinguished from the compassion that might make us engage with violent subject matter outside our own experience. I care very deeply that Scotland and the wider UK acquire a fuller awareness of what a word like ‘disappeared’ means in Mexico, for example, and that care might very well leave its mark on the page, but this in itself is not a state or act of witness. I have been blessed with a comparatively peaceful life and I’m simply interested in representing the stakes life is played for in my writing. Variation helps with the balance.
LB: Labour recurs in your work – farming, fishing, crafting. The farm in ‘The Second Tea Farm in Scotland’ seems bound to both failure and hope. How do you think about labour in your writing, both the manual work depicted in the poems and the craft of making the poems themselves?
PRM: You don’t have to be a rustic to understand the connection between labour and land – they’re paradigmatic – but what can I say, I love Hamish Henderson, the folk revival, and a great deal that flows from it. It’s a leftist legacy with labour at its core. The tea poem is partly about the desire for a less frenetic, less wasteful working life. The short stints of farm work and WWOOFing I’ve done have been attempts to satisfy it, but poetry is really where I go to reckon with such things, not for answers but for transformation. Although I find it attractive, ‘getting back to the land’ is the most easily co-optable of all ideals and should be treated not just with caution but downright suspicion. It has done so much harm. Think Zionism. Think lebensraum. Think green fascism. All the same, finding metaphors in agricultural labour goes further back than Virgil and using a needle and thread must be among the most universal actions in human history, so why wouldn’t I write about them? While the real work might be writing, tea plants, cob houses, and the labour surrounding them belong to a symbolic order I find a lot of humanity in. As you say, there’s a balance of hope and despair there. There’s also economy in it, which I value in poetry too.
As for the labour in writing itself, it may not be serious toil but I do aspire to convey the vigorous experience it often is. Something with an electrical charge. Something bright. This is different from saying it’s an effort or a chore. The last thing you want your reader to feel is that the poem was a hassle to write. As I say, I wish I wasted less, including time and energy, and part of poetry’s efficacy is how spare it is and therefore how little it can demand of you, relatively speaking.
Leo Boix is a Latinx bilingual poet, translator and educator born in Argentina who lives in the UK. His first collection, Ballad of a Happy Immigrant (2021), was a Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice. Southernmost: Sonnets (2025) was shortlisted for the 2025 Forward Prize for Best Collection.
Patrick Romero McCafferty’s pamphlet Glass Knot Sun was published by ignitionpress in 2025. His poems have appeared most recently in Granta and Wasafiri. ‘An August Work Party’, an EP with the band anoraq, is forthcoming in Spring 2026. He also edits Wet Grain, a magazine for land poetry.
