This fictional account of Columbus's travels through the western sea and the western imagination is by turns poetic, ironic, and humorous. Songs, conversations, images, and Columbus's thoughts create such a vivid picture that readers will feel as though they are along for the ride. This lucid tale recreates the power to invent; it is a book about perception and reality and an analysis of the autobiographical voice.

Marta Marín-Dòmine is an associate professor in the Department of Languages and Literatures and Director of the Centre for Memory and Testimony Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her research is on the Spanish literature of concentration camps and on the field of memory representation of past violent events. She is presently working on a collaborative project to elaborate a Dictionary of Memory in Europe and Latin America.

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“Imagine the infant Christopher Columbus vaulting out of his cradle, striking his head on the world, and spawning his megalomaniacal wanderlust. Thus Robert Finley begins his exquisite prose poem, The Accidental Indies, a fantasy of precise Language and provacative imagery. I suspect Finley of past lives or channeling or worse, because he seems to know what really happened heading westward over the water in 1492. You do not simply read this story, you ride it, relish it, and sometimes find yourself in it.” —Dava Sobel, author of Galileo's Daughter