Abhay K’s six poems in a 2020 Scroll.in excerpt offer a literary way to travel through Latin American landscapes and cultural references: from Chile’s Atacama Desert and Buenos Aires to Brasília, Rio de Janeiro and Machu Picchu. They are selections from The Alphabets of Latin America: A Carnival of Poems, a collection of 108 poems written during the poet’s travels across the region between 2016 and 2019. Scroll presented the excerpt as a virtual journey for readers during lockdown—not as a travel guide or a comprehensive portrait of Latin America.
What these six poems are—and where they come from
Scroll.in published the excerpt on May 29, 2020, reproducing the poems with permission from The Alphabets of Latin America: A Carnival of Poems, published by Bloomsbury. The collection is organized alphabetically from A to Z and draws on Abhay K’s travels across Latin America from 2016 to 2019, according to the article.
The six selections move among places, literary allusions, cultural imagery and imagined encounters. Their speakers are poetic voices, not a guarantee of documentary reporting: in particular, the poem “Borges” turns a search for the writer into a conceit rather than recording a meeting. Read together, the poems offer snapshots shaped by memory and imagination, not an exhaustive account of the region.
How the six selections travel across the region
“Atacama”: landscape in fragments
Short images build a sense of the cold Atacama Desert: windmills, the Andes, dawn, salt shores and Laguna Miniques. The poem’s attention falls on scale, stillness and unfamiliar terrain, letting landscape rather than a plotted journey guide the reader.
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“Borges”: a search that turns inward
In Buenos Aires, the speaker looks for Jorge Luis Borges in libraries, cafés, streets and La Recoleta. The search ends not in an encounter with the writer but in a mirror, where the speaker finds their own face. The poem uses Borges as a literary presence and a way to think about searching, reading and self-recognition.
The excerpt opens this poem with a passage it attributes to Borges’s “Death and the Compass.” Because the wording and translation have not been checked against an authoritative edition, it is better to treat that attribution as the one printed by Scroll rather than reproduce the lines as a verified quotation.
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“Caipirinha”: a Brasília bartender’s welcome
A bartender introduces the speaker to the drink and speaks affectionately about Brazil through figurative language. Their recipe-like exchange names cachaça, lemon, crushed sugar, ice and “love distilled.” That list belongs to the poem’s dialogue; it is not presented here as independently verified cocktail-making guidance.
“Prufrock at the Carnival in Rio”: hesitation amid spectacle
The longest selection echoes the title and some rhetorical gestures of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” but puts its speaker amid Rio Carnival. The poem evokes the Sambadrome, dancers, floats and crowds, then moves toward Copacabana and Ipanema. At its center is a tension between joining the revelry and standing back to watch. References to “Krishna” and “Rasa lila” form part of the poem’s imagery.
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The poem’s title is printed as “Machu Pichhu” in the Scroll excerpt, although its lines refer to “Machu Picchu.” Dancing stones become a prompt to celebrate and persist through earthquakes, storms and danger. The spelling difference is worth noting when looking for the poem by title.
“Samba”: a brief change of state
The shortest selection offers a compact image: a beam of light enters a dark alley, and the spirit takes over the body. Its few lines make the movement from darkness to dance feel immediate.
What kind of virtual journey these poems offer
The locations span a Chilean desert and Andean imagery, Buenos Aires, Brasília, Rio de Janeiro and Machu Picchu. But the poems do not work like a route with directions or a single account of Latin American life. Place is interwoven with literary reference, travel memory, cultural imagery and imaginative speakers. The “virtual journey” framing makes sense as an invitation to picture distant places through poetry, especially in the lockdown context in which Scroll published the excerpt.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Where to find the collection
All six selections come from Abhay K’s The Alphabets of Latin America: A Carnival of Poems, published by Bloomsbury. The 2020 Scroll.in article identifies it as a 108-poem collection organized from A to Z and written during travels between 2016 and 2019. For readers who want to continue beyond these six poems, the collection is the source to seek out; the excerpt does not establish its current availability, formats or price.
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