Chilean Poet

Nine years after their bewildering breakup, aspiring poet Gonzalo reunites with his high school girlfriend, Carla, now the mother of a six-year-old son, Vicente. Soon the three form a happy sort-of family--a stepfamily, though no such word exists in their language.

After a few years, their ambitions pull the lovers in different directions, but traces of Gonzalo remain: Vicente inherits his love of poetry. When, at eighteen, he meets Pru, an American journalist literally and figuratively lost in Santiago, he encourages her to write about Chilean poets--not the famous, dead kind, your Nerudas or Mistrals or Bola隳s, but rather the living, everyday poets, who are also a kind of family. By the time Pru's article is published, Gonzalo has returned to Chile. But will he and Vicente find their way back to one another?

In Chilean Poet, Alejandro Zambra chronicles with enormous tenderness and insight the everyday moments--absurd, painful, sexy, sweet, profound--that make up our personal histories. Exploring how we choose our families and how we betray them, and what it means to be a man in relationships, it is a bold and brilliant new work by one of the most important writers of our time.