Sappho

Greece

Where in Bolaño: The Savage Detectives III, "The Deserts of Sonora" — García Madero's poetics quizzes in the Impala, where sapphic verse turns up among the metrical terms he fires at Lima, Belano and Lupe while Alberto's Camaro closes in
Why read them: The Lesbian ninth muse (c. 630–c. 570 BC) who survives as scraps of papyrus and quotations by grammarians, which is to say the first poet whose lost work matters more than her extant work — Cesárea Tinajero's true ancestor, an oeuvre reconstructed from rumor.
Start with: If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (trans. Anne Carson, 2002), find editions on Open Library

"Fragment 31" (c. 600 BC), author's page on Open Library