4:56

These poems by Carlos Fuentes Lemus (1973-1999), son of the author of Terra Nostra and Christopher Unborn, are an introduction to the unique voice of a sensitive but unsentimental young poet who became aware of his mortality at a very early age. A hemophiliac who as a child contracted HIV from contaminated blood products, he struggled to come to terms with his condition through the practice of art while paying homage to those artists from the Western canon (and from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame) whose work inspired and shaped his own, such as Keats, Van Gogh, Wilde, Rimbaud, Schiele, Kerouac, Elvis, Hendrix, and Dylan. 4:56's heartbreaking "songs and visions" record his fleeting passage through our world.

"There is a style that is the essence of all styles--a desperate rebellion against the world that is simultaneously an early understanding of the world--found only in Rimbaud, in Kerouac, in Sylvia Plath, in Pizarnik. You have to be young and lucid for existence to hurt so much, for the body to feel so much, for tenderness to hurt so much. You have to feel, like Carlos Fuentes Lemus, that every day you can lose everything in order to find everything and know everything."
--Tomás Eloy Martínez, La Nación (Argentina)

"I remember that I spent hours captivated by a few lines that revealed what I sensed: beautiful, abrupt lines, without the least self-complacency, imbued with a hidden and unsettling pain. I have always been enchanted by the magic of English poetry, and its ability to express more in fewer words than other languages I know. Carlos Fuentes Lemus moved within its sphere almost on tiptoe, oblivious to any rhetoric and easy sentimentalism, with the delicacy and weightlessness with which he fleetingly traced his path through life."
--Juan Goytisolo, from the Afterword to 4:56

"These poems show a young man's descent to Hades--with Bob Dylan as his Virgil and Janis Joplin as the Sybil--and, a double mission, his steps, line by line, guide his return."
--Julián Ríos