Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Spanish by Peter Boyle. "A sixty-year-old man writes a poem and entitles it 'Anima.' Days later he writes another poem with a tone similar to the first, entitles it 'Anima', then realizes he has just begun a series which must all bear the same title. Furthermore, the man decides that in the future and till the day of his death he is going to continue writing poems that, since they have this tone, will bear the title 'Anima.' At the end of a year, having written some 150 poems, he extracts from the accumulated mass 60 poems...

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. A tokonoma is an alcove in a traditional Japanese house, which serves to display a scroll, ikebana or a special painting or print. It is also a kind of code-word in neo-baroque Hispanic writing, having been much used by the movement's founder and inspiration, Cuban poet Jose Lezama Lima. Here the tokonoma is part of Jose Kozer's linguistic armoury: another Cuban poet, but this time one in exile in the USA and, by common consent, the doyen of the current Hispanic neo-baroque. Here Kozer engages with Japanese and Chinese poetry, learning, myth and much more...

Jose Kozer is one of the most influential contemporary Cuban poets working today. A key figure in the neobaroque movement within contemporary Latin American poetry, he is one of only three Cubans to win the Pablo Neruda Prize. This is a bilingual edition translated into English by Peter Boyle. In addition, Boyle provides an extensive introduction placing Kozer's work in a critical context.