Craib looks at the events that occurred during a four-month period in 1920 in Santiago in order to reconstruct a kaleidoscopic view of Chilean society of the time. The title is somewhat misleading: although his book is about poetics of resistance it does not engage in any serious way with poetry of the time. Craib, echoing John Donne, shows that no political figure is alone in his or her actions.

The figure of the young anarchist José Domingo Gómez Rojas, who died on September 29, 1920, is well remembered by his compatriots through monuments, memorials, and revolutionary poetry and serves as a connecting thread in weaving of the study of the Chilean history in the post-World War I era. However, Craib intends to “rescue” him from the “lonely martyrdom” of history by showing his place within the web of political and social actors whose lives interlaced, touched, guided and inspired each other. As he does so, he foregrounds an original and well-researched alternative narrative of the late 1910s. The narrative includes not only those who fought for a more just Chile where the violence of everyday hunger, illness and exploitations would be eradicated and who were seen as anarchists, agitators and subversives, but also those who believed that the current societal values needed to be defended at any cost, such as judges and state prosecutors.

Craib's book is a product of extraordinary research in the historical and personal archives (Marxist historian Marcelo Segall Rosenmann's archive, for example), combined with vivid portrayals of the tumultuous period he has chosen, often taken from meticulous readings of Chilean dailies and periodicals. However, the volume is also the product of a desire to approach the narration of history through a sort of postmodern technique of historiographic metafiction—definitely closer to “historiographic” than to “fiction” along its wide spectrum. This metafiction intends to narrate a single moment in history by overlapping the perspectives of different actors to demonstrate that an intertwining of accounts leads to the most honest and truthful reading of the past.

The volume consists of four chapters, an introduction, and an epilogue in which an almost day-by-day (and at times even hour-by-hour) account of the events is laid out. Each chapter is focused on a person whose activism played a part in, and eventually, directly and indirectly, led to the death of 24-year-old José Domingo Gómez Rojas. The book opens with a somewhat poetic description of the funeral procession of October 1, 1920 (“The body of the firecracker poet wound its way through central Santiago”) and closes with a discussion of the events surrounding his death in terms of their “pivotal” importance for the future of the Chilean nation, among them Augusto Pinochet's military coup of 1973, the 2001 “backpack uprising” known as the mochilazo, the “penguin revolution” of 2006, and student protests in 2011.

The first chapter introduces the figure of Casimiro Barrios, an immigrant from Spain and an activist and organizer. As an unwanted radical threat to the social order from the point of view of the Chilean government, he was deported to Peru in late July, just as the atmosphere in Santiago was becoming heated and the repression was increasing. The second chapter weaves textual threads around a “relentless agitator and a powerful orator,” Juan Gandulfo, and his younger brother Pedro, who voiced the discomfort and disagreement of university students regarding the social and political path that the country was taking.

The third chapter tells the story of a printer and anarchist agitator, Julio Valente, along with that of Judge José Astorquiza, who presided over the incarceration of a young poet and the inhumane treatment that lead to his death. The final chapter focuses on Gómez Rojas himself, picking up the threads from other chapters and foregrounding his connections to the other events that took place during the third week of July 1920 in Santiago.

This book is an imaginative, original, and ambitious intent to account for those protagonists of Chilean history whose actions in July of 1920 showed human responsibility not only to act and resist, but also to imagine justice that is more than poetic.