This book takes up the experiment of connecting Buddhist practices
to an American landscape. In a 2008 interview Perez states, "If
Buddhism is to have a role in Cuban life it must be in harmony with
the basic ethical and natural values of this land; it must give, so
to say, its blood and marrow to the soil. Perez seems to have
thrown even "revolutionary" readers for a loop by pursuing that
harmony, synthesizing island poetics with Zen Buddhism. What, asked
his fellow writers, does Zen have to do with Cuba and its cultural
traditions? The question of Zen's potential relation to Cuban
culture is at once raised for debate and answered (albeit
indirectly) within these poems. One of the threads running through
the pages is music, ranging from minimalist intonations to the high
energies of the urban guaguanco, and beyond Havana's city lines to
symbolic sources such as the Cuban national anthem. As the last
example hints, another thread in the book takes up the experience
of patria (homeland). The Buddhist quest for enlightenment
intersects with evocations of Havana in the late 1990s, yielding an
other zone from which the nation and its call are never quite
absent.Like the Zen dojo in the center of a lively city, the poetry
becomes a place to sound the many layers of Havana's vivid
surrounds.
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