Flu in the Time of Allergies gives life to realities and settings deeply disturbed by the unpleasant human lameness to give life to extremities, savagery, darkness, social injustice, and obsessions in a diverse and powerful collection of poems. Oranges fall in love with naughty lemons, Castro and Pinochet pull on toes dressed as Jesuits, bombs, rafts, power outages, hyenas at an opera, cats crowned with thorn of roses, fortune tellers, swelled feet, desiccated hands crying for their loss, Babalawo ceremonies, a cat consoling a dog, days spent dancing for sunshine, and humanity's lameness weighing down an already decaying world. And yet in the nucleus of so much sadness, as evident in the reality of the world humans interact each day, there is room for love. Parra's first collection of poems is a powerful chronicle of the human condition in diverse, weird, and vibrant settings.
