Gioconda Belli's poetry, widely published and revered in Latin America and Europe, celebrates the longing for a society in which humanity constructs its future, animated by an inextinguishable erotic, maternal, and transcentendly loving desire. As Salman Rushdie wrote in his book, The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey, her poetry is "a kind of public love poetry that comes closer to expressing the passion of Nicaragua than anything I [have] yet heard."