Two young poets vanish into the Sonoran Desert searching for a disappeared literary foremother, and the novel that records their passage takes the form of a chorus: dozens of voices scattered across decades and continents, each offering a fragment of Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima. Roberto Bolao's 1998 novel is the great book of literary youth, of that moment when poetry feels more urgent than food and the boundaries between art and life dissolve into road trips, bar fights, and manifestos on napkins. The structure spirals outward from Mexico City in the 1970s to Barcelona, Tel Aviv, and Liberia, gathering testimony the way myth gathers versions. Bolao knew the search for a lost poet is always also the search for what poetry once promised.