The Romantic Dogs

The poems

• "The Romantic Dogs"
• "Self Portrait at Twenty Years"
• "Resurrection"
• "In the Reading Room of Hell"
• "Soni"
• "Ernesto Cardenal and I"
• "Day Bleeding Rain"
• "The Worm"
• "Lupe"
• "The Front Line"
• "La Francesa"
• "The Outsider Ape"
• "Dirty, Poorly Dressed"
• "I Dreamt of Frozen Detectives"
• "The Detectives"
• "The Lost Detectives"
• "The Frozen Detectives"
• "Fragments"
• "The Ghost of Edna Lieberman"
• "Visit to the Convalescent"
• "Godzilla in Mexico"
• "Verses by Juan Ramón"
• "Dino Campana Revises His Biography in Castel Pulci Psychiatric Hospital"
• "Palingenesis"
• "The Nurses"
• "Twilight in Barcelona"
• "The Greek"
• "Mr. Wiltshire"
• "Rain"
• "Luck"
• "X-Rays"
• "The Last Love Song of Pedro J. Lastarria, Alias 'El Chorito'"
• "My Life in the Tubes of Survival"
• "On the Edge of the Cliff"
• "Roadster"
• "The Last Savage"
• "Half-Baked"
• "Atole"
• "The Donkey"
• "Parra's Footsteps"
• "I'll Try to Forget"
• "Muse"
• "With the Flies"

  Reception

"The collection is dominated by a series of sustained reminiscences, fuelled by rage and a sense of cornered idealism at key moments the writing pitches a kind of visionary anger. Bolaño seems most at home when describing the sparse Mexican towns near the border with the US and much of the best writing evokes characters, such as "The Worm" or "Lupe", who inhabit this violent world. But the book ends on a very different note with two sudden love poems – lyrical, even gentle – that celebrate the possibility of a kind of salvation"