the operating system, 2019
“In the Drying Shed of Souls: Poetry from Cuba's Generation Zero, with its focus on poets born after 1970, offers a poignant sampling of some of the most exciting writing being produced in Cuba RIGHT NOW! Coming of age during the economic struggle of Cuba's Special Period, these writers show no patterns of allegiance to the ideological or aesthetic camps that have defined the Cuban literary world before and after the Revolution. Taken together, these poems advance the rich tradition of Cuban poetry. The selection is finely edited and remarkably translated by Katherine Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, poets, scholars, translators and avid chroniclers of contemporary Latin American letters. The poems in this anthology interrogate the nation and its history; exile; the richness and poverty of language; the visceral realities of the body; domestic violence; and epistemology and the nature of meaning, among other themes. To read them is to get an indelible sense of a Cuban poetry scene that is formally dazzling, civically critical, and deeply engaged with the question of what a poem can mean to a public. In their erudite and provocative introduction, Hedeen and Rodríguez Núñez assert that contemporary Cuban poetry gets largely ignored both in the Spanish-speaking world and in North America because of its failure to adhere to literary and sociological expectations. In the Drying Shed of Souls demands that we take these writers on their own terms, as poets who have built a stunning and urgent body of work that is personal, universal, political, philosophical, and unafraid.”
–Daniel Borzutsky, National Book Award winner, 2016