One of the best things about book trekking is discovering new connections between literature and place that you might never have expected. Here I am at Niagara Falls on my book trek to read the literature of Central Canada, and I have discovered one of the greatest Cuban and more broadly Latin America, even simply American, poets to have lived. I am ASHAMED to admit, that I did not know about Jose Maria Heredia before spotting this plaque beside Horseshoe Falls. But I’m MORE excited to have encountered it here. I paused to read his famous Ode to Niagara, written in 1824 and published in 1825, and his literary representation of the falls will now layer into my own perception of them forever