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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.
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