action books, 2017
“The imagination of this Cuban, this true poet...stains the darkness of these times with a red squirrel guided by the light... Víctor Rodríguez Núñez doesn’t wait for the arrival of anyone because he was baptized by poetry at birth.”
–Juan Gelman
“Víctor Rodríguez Núñez is a unique poet, not comparable to anyone writing today in any language I can read. [...] Immense is his power of inheritance, the fierceness of his autonomy, compassion and instinct to broaden the livable space. Nobody else has such a gift to encompass so many crossroads, to be at the heights Vallejo once was, but so free and singular. Nobody else can be gracious, quotidian, marvelously strange and a winner of history at the same time. With branches and roots still expanding.”
–Tomaž Šalamun
“Víctor Rodríguez Núñez knows “There won’t be revolution/if we don’t let night speak.” This collection lets night speak in its unruly strangeness, “withstand[ing]/the advance of clarity” and established order. I know of no poet who gives us such vital access to “the crowded inner landscape” and puts us into such intimate relationship to its numinous mysteries. This is visionary poetry: relentlessly human, fearless, fierce, and dazzling.”
–Mary Szybist