The sun unwound

About this book

The result of a 20-year collaboration between poet Edward Dorn and scholar Gordon Brotherston, The Sun Unwound gathers together the disparate voices of oppressed Americans through the centuries: the hymns, songs, and prayers of Mesoamericans and other native peoples; the verse of eight Latin American guerrillas of the 1960s; and works by three of Latin America's most important avant-garde poets of the twentieth century. The Native Americans saw their cultures obliterated; most of the guerrillas died in their struggles; and the modernists have faced persecution, prison, and torture for their left-wing convictions. Previously untranslated or unavailable to most North Americans, their poems offer a striking counterpoint to the colonialist, capitalist, Anglo-Saxon ethos.