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...
Hibiscus, banyan trees, and royal palms. Mango jam, white slices of sugarcane, and oxtail stew. Childhood games with fireflies and snail shells. These are images of a Cuba that many remember and others have never known, captured here in the powerful poems of Virgil Suarez. Born in Havana in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, Suarez is now one of more than a million Cubans living in the United States. In Palm Crows Suarez offers a compelling cancion of loss, longing, and memory as he explores the meaning of exile. In poems that range from playful and fantastic to elegiac and...
Hibiscus, banyan trees, and royal palms. Mango jam, white slices of sugarcane, and oxtail stew. Childhood games with fireflies and snail shells. These...
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 speaks with intimacy and urgency of a life lived as an outsider, a life filled with dislocation and alienation born of exile. He writes with great pathos and passion, often anger, but always with the good-natured humor of a troubadour and the keen eye of a fool for life, for love. These are high-octane, feverishly energized poems that cut to the bone and heart of memory and recollection, which for the poet stand as a testament to the preservation of family, friendship and a solitary quest for human dignity.
Virgil Suarez speaks with intimacy and urgency of a life lived as an outsider, a life filled with dislocation and alienation born of exile. He writes ...
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...
