Poet in New York

Lorca arrived in New York in 1929 during the Wall Street crash and wrote the most formally radical poetry of his career in response to what he found: the dehumanization of capitalism grinding human beings into economic units, the specific exploitation of Black culture — Harlem's music and energy absorbed into white commercial entertainment while Black New Yorkers lived in poverty a mile away, the mechanization of everything that had been alive. He was a gay Spanish poet in a city that had no category for him and he saw it with the clarity that comes from being completely outside it. Franco's fascists shot him in 1936 and buried him in an unmarked grave that has never been found. The poems were suppressed under Franco for decades. What survived is the most searing indictment of New York capitalism ever written and one of the most formally adventurous poetry collections in any language — surrealism not as an aesthetic game but as the only form adequate to a reality that had become genuinely surreal. The Greg Simon and Steven F. White translation published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux is the one to use.