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Good stuff this edition and it's a long one - Ernesto Cardenal makes a rare visit to Denver for a celebration of his new book. XicanIndie XIII is up and running - my post, thanks to Tanya over at Su Teatro, includes a schedule, summaries of the films, trailers, and details about the festival, now a mainstay of the Denver cultural scene. Finally, two close friends of La Bloga are up for a book award - how cool is that?

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The Origin of Species and Other Poems
Ernesto Cardenal
translated and introduced by John Lyons
foreword by Anne Waldman
Texas Tech University Press, April, 2011
[publisher's website text]

Ernesto Cardenal, widely acknowledged as Latin America's greatest living poet, continues to craft works of striking beauty, as demonstrated in this collection’s title poem, an exquisite meditation on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Among the twenty new poems included here are many appearing for the first time in English, some for the first time anywhere. Cardenal has also added new cantigas, or cantos, to supplement his book-length masterpiece, Cosmic Canticle. “There is order even in the foam of a torrent,” affirms Cardenal. Evolution, natural selection, existence, and purpose figure into this complex symphony. In his characteristic blend of poetry, politics, and prayer, he grapples with elemental questions of life, delivering a thought-provoking, joyous vision of an earthly paradise in which humanity must find its role and calling.

Cardenal epitomizes what makes literature live in Central America today. —Booklist
One of the world’s major poets. —Choice
Cardenal is a major epic-histocial poet, in the grand lineage of Central American prophet Rubén Dario. —Allen Ginsberg
One of the most influential (and controversial) poets of his generation. —Robert Hass

Praise for The Origin of Species and Other Poems
The crowning work in the long career of this well-known Latin American poet . . . [whose] revolutionary fire is still evident, but it's subsumed in the subjects of the poems rather than manifest[ed] in slogans. —Ed Ochester
A Whitmanic embrace and . . . a timely political resonance with a particularly difficult and broken-hearted new century. —Anne Waldman, from the foreword

The author of more than thirty-five books, many translated into multiple languages, Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in 1965. His studies with Trappist monk Thomas Merton and his involvement with the Sandinista movement in his home country have informed his writing and political activism. He lives in