About the Author

Frank Báez, born in the Dominican Republic in 1978, has published six books of poetry, a short story collection, and three nonfiction books. In 2006 he received the Short Story Prize of the Santo Domingo International Book Fair for Págales tú a los Psicoanalistas, and in 2009 he won the Salomé Ureña National Poetry Prize for Postales. In 2017 he was selected by the Hay Festival as a member of Bogotá39, the list of the best Latin American writers under forty years of age. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies, and translations of his books of poetry have been published in Arabic, Dutch, German and English. Anthony Seidman (Los Angeles, 1973) is a poet and translator. His most recent collection of poetry is That Beast in the Mirror (Black Herald Press, France), a bilingual collection of his poetry with French translations by Blandine Longre. His full-length translations include A Stab in the Dark (LARB Classics, 2019) by Facundo Bernal, Caribbean Ants (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020) by Homero Pumarol, and Contra Natura (Cardboard House Press, 2022) by Rodolfo Hinostroza.

Reviews

"Tough, smart, reckless, heartfelt and overwhelmingly alive." Junot Diaz "The End of the World Came to My Neighborhood is a collection of poems invaluable in confidences, a wagon loaded with revealed secrets." Manuel Madrid "Báez has honed a talent for turning conversant language into fiery rhetoric, a mix of cool observations, pop-cultural connoisseurship, and crackling street smarts." Michael Barron "Frank Báez's language has the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck, and he has had to stay there, without the cut that separates him from his cultural origin" Elidio La Torre Lagares "To venture into the poetry of Frank Báez (Santo Domingo, 1978) is to dive into a tragicomic, apparently autobiographical world of poems about a young islander who would most like to go out into the world and become an artist. The laid-back, almost prose-driven rhythm is immediately striking, and though at first it seems to be used almost randomly, it provides the one constant amidst this Caribbean melancholy, amplified yet more when Báez performs his own work." Poetry International