Early modern Spanish American poetry (c. 1500-1700) is a fascinating but little-studied aspect of Hispanic colonial culture. Spanish American poetry was transmitted in material ways, not simply as an intellectual and literary phenomenon. Poetry was considered as a written and oral object, disseminated, conditioned and controlled by a range of societal players both within and beyond the urban space. While the obvious networks of interchange connected the European metropolis to the burgeoning colonies, there were also cross-regional connections in Central and South America. As performance art, poetry connected with other art forms in the region -- music, painting and sculpture -- but as an act of devotion it also intersected the history of early American religious culture. This wide-ranging and highly interdisciplinary volume offers pioneering work bringing together scholars from both Europe and the Americas, North and South. Rodrigo Cacho is Reader in Spanish Golden Age and Colonial Studies at the University of Cambridge. Imogen Choi is Associate Professor of Spanish at Exeter College, University of Oxford.