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.

Alamar, the home of award-winning Cuban poet Juan Carlos Flores, is the setting for his collection, The Counterpunch and Other Horizontal Poems) / El contragolpe (y otros poemas horizontales). Constructed as a self-help community in eastern Havana, Alamar is the largest housing complex in the world. Flores's highly structured texts, organized into "art galleries," present prose paintings of a big place in very small form. Flores builds a poetic landscape with repeating structures that mirror Alamar's five-floor walkups. Exploring life and dream on the flat surfaces of the poems, he gives fleeting glimpses of perception and survival at the urban margins. As the poet ages, so ages Alamar itself. Yet both find renewal through poetry. The eighty poems in this bilingual edition offer the first English translation of a complete Flores collection. It will also be of interest to Spanish-language readers seeking access to Cuban literature abroad. Award-winning scholar and translator Kristin Dykstra has compiled an introduction in which she presents Flores, his literary contexts, and references in his poems. Because Flores made specific requests regarding translation, fascinating notes also clarify and expound on choices Dykstra makes in the English version. A deluxe edition with a handmade, limited-edition color linocut print, including a letterpress-printed poem signed by the author, is available directly from the University of Alabama Press.

Marcelo Morales's The World as Presence/El mundo como ser showcases, for the first time in English, a challenging, bold, and vivid new voice in Cuban literature. Marcelo Morales was born in Cuba in 1977. He is an established, prize-winning writer, yet he is younger in comparison to most of the Cuban poets known internationally, many of whom were born prior to the 1959 revolution. While older generations of Cuban poets have wrestled in their work with social and political critique, those critiques have often been articulated through formal experimentation and abstraction, unsurprising given the censorship and the real threats of punishment that dissident writers have faced. Morales, however, directly interrogates both the Cuban past and present. References to many significant moments, people, and issues in Cuban history and culture can be found throughout his work. Along with references to the activist group "The White Ladies," the 1976 bombing of Cuban Airlines Flight 455, and the military aid that Cubans provided to Angola during its fight for independence, Morales's poetry follows a timeline ranging from Marti to Guevara to the day of the 2014 announcement by Obama and Castro that diplomatic relations between the two nations would finally be restored. As Cuba experiences a series of historically remarkable transitions, Morales emerges from this context to offer an incisive poetic account of this critical moment in Cuban, as well as world, history. The World as Presence/El mundo como ser is both the debut of this work in any language and the first English translation of a complete Morales collection. Given the bilingual format, this book will be of interest both to English and Spanish readers.