‘El libro era una cosa que ocupaba espacio’ (Néstor Perlongher). Recent works on poetry, publishing and performance in the Southern Cone

On a 2014 trip to Argentina, I visited a number of bookshops. Buenos Aires, in particular, is renowned for its iconic stores: the Ateneo Gran Splendid, in a cavernous converted theatre; the elegant and trendsetting Eterna Cadencia, which also runs an influential publishing arm; or the once seminal, now defunct, Gandhi on Avenida Corrientes, whose name has been revived on a fashionable Palermo shopping street. Those I visited this time tended to be smaller in scale. Eloísa Cartonera, the cardboard-recycling book maker in La Boca, is now an established feature on the tourist circuit. The poetry publisher Bajo la luna opened its own small bookshop in Villa Crespo. Librería Mi Casa, meanwhile, is just that: Nurit Kasztelan, the owner, is a poet who has created, in a back bedroom in her family home in Villa Crespo, a catalogue of contemporary Argentine literature with international distribution, alongside her own imprint, producing attractive paperbacks with postcard inserts and eye-catching covers