Gabriela Mistral’s Desolación (1922), the debut collection of the first Latin American writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature, is a radical refusal of Latin American modernismo and European and North American modernism, which was produced in large part by formally educated, cosmopolitan elite for a self-same audience. This chapter recontextualises Desolación as a collection that introduces Mistral’s modern Latin American intersectional subjectivity through poetry that challenges contemporary gender and social hierarchies, cultural norms, and dominant aesthetics. As a mestiza, rural, queer woman writer, Mistral was aware of the challenges and opportunities of pursuing her literary ambitions, and yet she engaged her contemporaries and with tradition to establish her own poetics outside of popular movements. In addition, our chapter will reclaim Mistral’s craft decisions in Desolación from conservative readings that equate formalism with pre-modernist literature and likewise deny her poems’ queer themes, an argument that thus situates the collection as a political project of social engagement for a wider readership spanning across social classes.