Description
Poetry. Latinx Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Kristin Dykstra. Bilingual Edition. Reina María Rodríguez is the author of many books of poetry and prose—and something of a living legend in Havana's literary world. These poems are selected from En la arena de Padua (Ediciones Unión, 1992), the book that established the language of crisis for which she is known today. Haunting poems explore the ghosts of people, places, economies, and time itself. Includes a translator's note by Dykstra and an afterward by Roberto Tejada that together help situate Rodríguez (and other recent Cuban poetry) in historical terms.
"Reina María Rodríguez sings across borders of real bodies and image nations. A critical voice for a poetics of the Americas hundreds of years in the making, Rodríguez's poems overflow with insistent rhythms of everyday, refracted by a hundred mirrors facing inward, adjacent, beyond; turning on the promise of each next line. This poetry expresses the necessity not of phrase or stanza, not of breath or idea... but of motion."—Charles Bernstein.
Author Bio
Reina María Rodríguez (b. 1952) lives in Havana, Cuba. Among other career awards, she has won the 2002 Alejo Carpentier Medal for Achievement in Cuban literature, Cuba's 2013 National Prize for Literature, and the 2014 Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Prize for Poetry. It is difficult to name her most important books due to the sustained quality of her writing. With La foto del invernadero (THE WINTER GARDEN PHOTOGRAPH), now in a bilingual edition from Ugly Duckling Presse, she took her second Casa de las Américas prize in 1998. Recent books of poetry by Rodríguez include El piano (The Piano) and Luciérnagas (Fireflies). Among her many books exploring prose and prose poetry are Páramos (Plains, which won the 1993 Julián del Casal prize as well as a 1995 National Critics' Award), Otras cartas a Milena (Other Letters to Milena, 2003; bilingual edition published by the University of Alabama Press), a novel entitled Tres maneras de tocar un elefante (Three Ways to Touch an Elephant, which won the Italo Calvino Prize), Variedades de Galiano (Galiano St. Variety), Otras mitologías (Other Mythologies), and La caja de Bagdad.
Author City: HAVANA CUB