Shimmering with saturated color and heat, Guide to the Blue Tongue is an intoxicating sequence of memory poems about growing up in the tropics, threaded through the myth of Caliban from Shakespeare's The Tempest. Caliban is the monstrous native, in love with what he cannot possess, lost to his own sense of identity. In Virgil Surez's vision, the island of Caliban's imprisonment merges with the island of Cuba, where the carboneros make charcoal and sell it door-to-door by the pound, young boxers crackle with caged energy, dock workers spill like ants out of the bellies of ships, and the rain...
Shimmering with saturated color and heat, Guide to the Blue Tongue is an intoxicating sequence of memory poems about growing up in the tropics, thread...
Ninety miles separate Cuba and Key West, Florida. Crossing that distance, thousands of Cubans have lost their lives. For Cuban American poet Virgil Suarez, that expanse of ocean represents the state of exile, which he has imaginatively bridged in over two decades of compelling poetry.
"Whatever isn't voiced in time drowns," Suarez writes in "River Fable," and the urgency to articulate the complex yearnings of the displaced marks all the poems collected here. 90 Miles contains the best work from Suarez's six previous collections: You Come Singing, Garabato, In the Republic...
Ninety miles separate Cuba and Key West, Florida. Crossing that distance, thousands of Cubans have lost their lives. For Cuban American poet Virgil...
Virgil Suarez's latest short story collection--his first in more than two decades--is subversive and emotionally piercing. A man whose yard is plagued by armadillos, a pair of boys who torment scorpions with gasoline fires, and a father's best friend wasting away with an illness as a son watches the deterioration with fascination and disgust--these are just a few of the characters in these seventeen stories that reveal a dark, satiric view of the human condition that's somehow ferocious and, at times, funny. Shades of Denis Johnson and George Saunders run throughout this potent volume of new...
Virgil Suarez's latest short story collection--his first in more than two decades--is subversive and emotionally piercing. A man whose yard is plagued...
