Eduardo Chirinos, an internationally acclaimed voice of Latin American letters, is professor of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures at the University of Montana. A member of Peru’s 80’s Generation, which came of age after a decade of military dictatorship, Chirinos won the Premio Casa de América in 2001 for his volume Breve historia de la música [A Brief History of Music] and the Premio Generación del 27 in 2009 for Mientras el lobo está [While the Wolf Is Around].

The Smoke of Distant Fires contains thirteen new poems from the contemporary Peruvian poet, essayist, critic, translator, and children’s book author, Eduardo Chirinos. Precisely organized and formally inventive, each poem in the collection is itself a collection of ten numbered stanzas, and each of the stanzas themselves are fully formed poems, a series of rhythmic, elliptical fables from a fully recognizable, yet wholly original, world.

The third collection of Chirinos’s poetry to appear in English, The Smoke of Distant Fires signals an exciting new direction in Chirinos’s poetics—its multivocal stanzas, evocative intertextuality, and enigmatic transparency join forces to perform a poignant interrogation of what it means to write poetry in the early twenty-first century.