The Poet Laureate
Dolores de Alma Blanca
Et spes et ratio studiorum in Caesare tantum.
Juvenal, Satire VII
The Poet Laureate is a novella by Dolores de Alma Blanca, translated by Lanfranco Aceti. It is dated London, 1 November 1998, and is published by Passero in 2026.
It is Christmas Eve in London. Dolores is writing her own press release, feeding a cat she addresses as an equal, and waiting on a publisher she has decided to keep waiting. A postcard arrives every Christmas from Poughkeepsie with three words on it. Across the street a man from MI5 has been installed to watch her, and she obliges him by leaving invented Chinese on the answering machine of an embassy library, which his colleagues decode from the price list of a Hong Kong brothel into a contract killing. The surveillance is the closest thing she has to being read.
This is also the book in which she writes the other one. The poems that Passero published as The Poems of the Poet Laureate are begun here, in a room, after a bad meeting, as a collection of poems for the rich — so the two volumes hold each other, and the one on the shelf is the object the novella is about.
FROM THE BOOK
“My husband has died.” She smiled. “They killed him and wanted to get the money too. I gave it to charity.” She took the card from his hand. “I gave the money away for Christmas, so I receive this every Christmas as a reminder that I was smarter, and a bigger, juicier, and fatter cunt than they were.”
She needed his opinion because he was a bean counter and, as such, anything he despised was worth more than a Nobel Prize. Dolores had sent him a book of her poems via first class mail and was eager to hear him slam the book, crush her poetics, and attack her personally.
“I think that ‘blow job to completion for twenty-five dollars’ has to do with the price of blowing someone up and making him disappear without trace,” said the code cracker. “I think she gave them the list of her prices. We are certainly uncovering something big: she could be some kind of contract killer.”
My MI5 neighbor was still trying to decode my fake Chinese messages and his surveillance was constant, tedious and at the same time something that I could no longer do without. I really hoped that I would not have to commit crimes in order to keep him there watching over me.
Poetry could have been lying down in a ditch after having been raped repeatedly and then killed with a heavy stone, the face smashed in so that no one could recognize her. All valuables were stripped and her fingers cut and her teeth pulled out. Then, after her organs had been removed for the black market, she was burned and the ashes collected and sold as organic fertilizer.
Dolores knew that they really did not want her to move or think too much, but just wanted her to sit on past glory in order to create a constant commercial reproduction of herself.
Dolores left that session of reprimands with a really good idea of what to bring back home with her. And that’s how she started to work on The Poems of the Poet Laureate. A collection of poems for the rich.
EDITIONS
First edition: Passero, 2026
Kindle edition: Amazon
CITATION
Dolores de Alma Blanca, The Poet Laureate, trans. Lanfranco Aceti (London, New York, and Rome: OCR/Passero Productions, 2026).