Breathing Underwater: Selected Poems

Pablo Valdivia's debut collection, Respirar bajo el agua (Breathing Underwater), stands as a conversation between a young man and the world around him. It is a collection tinged with aching nostalgia - an emotion intensified by the often sterile images inspired by the Swedish and English backdrops in many of its poems. Fittingly, Valdivia borrows a line from Natalia Ginzburg to begin one section: "England is beautiful and melancholic." And, with this epigraph, he succinctly describes his own poems; they are beautiful and melancholic.