Franci Louann’s Argentina poesía is a travel diary transformed by kaleidoscopic language. From the very first page, Argentina bursts into life in poems dripping with colours, fragrances, sensations. If you have not travelled to this vast country, these poems will take you there. The swirl of words, intense and provocative, is mitigated with peals of laughter, ironic reflections, and gentle affirmations. To be sure, Louann’s Argentina, where theft and muggings are just around the corner, is not a perfect place. Yet joyous friendship, little kindnesses, good food and conversation, light up each poem. In Louann’s trenchant poetic universe, living is not reasoned into place: it simply is.
~ Robert Martens, author off little creatures, Hush, city of beasts

Franci Louann’s book captures the unique and sensuous qualities of Argentina and its cities. It gives the reader the view of an outsider looking through eyes of love – personal and cultural – but clear-sighted about dark political histories and present complexities, and the difficulties gaining knowledge of how to live in a new land. In Louann’s poetry, we hear the music, taste the wine, read the authors, and enjoy the artists and architects of this place, while we take up residence and wander its streets, grand and humble.
~ Adrienne Drobnies, author of Salt and Ashes

Franci Louann’s love of Spanish and the locales in and around Buenos Aires raises this collection to the status of a “palo borracho, a tree full of giant flowers.” With leitmotifs of wine, street life, and relationships from a song that grows bilingually, Argentina poesía explores what makes up the patterns of our heartbeats. Rarely does a book so perfectly capture and express its author’s growing worldview. By the end of the book, after we’ve read poems written in both English and Spanish, we see how it is that someone can write the script for their dreams and how “at the orchid store they are filling a taxi with flowers.”
~ Kevin Spenst, author of Hearts Amok: a memoir in verse

Franci Louann had her first fine publications in Dorothy Livesay’s last anthology, Women’s Eye: 12 BC poets in the 1970s. Her name was then Fran Workman. In 2010, Lipstick Press published her Beach Cardiology. There have been awards for Franci’s poetry and for her decades of volunteer work in this area. She is thankful for many falling-off-her-chair moments. Franci was born in Stratford, Ontario. Her father was a British Home Child, her mother third-generation German-Canadian. From 2002 to 2017, Argentina was Franci’s “second home”. Poems about these latter experiences could fill another book.

Find Franci Louann on the web at francilouann.com