The Country Under My Skin

Belli grew up in the Nicaraguan upper class, became a poet, and joined the Sandinista revolution — smuggling weapons, running safe houses, falling in love with compañeros who died, eventually living in exile. This memoir is the dispatch from inside one of the 20th century's most idealistic and complicated revolutions — the poetry that sustained it, the machismo that undermined it, the US-funded Contra war that tried to strangle it. Belli writes about politics and the body and revolution and love as the same thing, which is the most honest account of what it actually feels like to commit your life to a cause.