smokestack books, 2016
winner, English Pen Award
An introduction to the work of thirty-six poets from Cuba writing in the second half of the twentieth-century, including Heberto Padilla, Nancy Morejón, and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez. The oldest poet here, Fina García-Marruz, was born in 1923; the youngest, Damaris Calderón, in 1967. It's an extraordinary and heady mix, combining African and Spanish influences, realism and surrealism, colloquialism and baroque, experiment and commitment, a lucid and moving introduction to a collective poetic subject that defies all kinds of social oppression.