Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) has caught on like a house on fire, and <em>The Romantic Dogs</em>, a bilingual collection of forty-four poems, offers American readers their first chance to encounter this literary phenomenon as a poet: his own first and strongest literary persona. These poems, wide-ranging in forms and length, have appeared in magazines such as <em>Harper's</em>, <em>Threepenny Review</em>, <em>The Believer</em>, <em>Boston Review</em>, <em>Soft Targets</em>, <em>Tin House</em>, <em>The Nation</em>, <em>Circumference</em>, <em>A Public Space</em>, and <em>Conduit</em>. Bolaño's poetic voice is like no other's: "At that time, I'd reached the age of twenty/and I was crazy. /I'd lost a country/but won a dream./Long as I had that dream/nothing else mattered...."