Published in Spanish as Otras cartas a Milena, Other Letters to Milena shows Rodriguez confronting pressing issues at the turn of the twenty-first century. These involve a new post-Soviet world and the realities of diasporic existence, which have a profound effect even on people like Rodriguez who have not migrated but continue to live and work in their home nation. The book's title references Franz Kafka, whose Letters to Milena was published after his death in 1952. This signals that Rodriguez participates in her city's long cosmopolitan tradition asserted by Cuban...

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...

Angel Escobar's Breach of Trust / Abuso de confianza is known by many as the most devastating book of his poetic generation. It is his first to be offered to an English-speaking audience. Merging personal and collective meditations, these twenty-three poems perform an indictment of violence. Escobar's poetry delineates lacerations etched on bodies and minds by the sanguinary twentieth century, which unfolded out of a longer modernity spanning the Americas.

Breach of Trust / Abuso de confianza outlived its author, who took his own life in 1997. Brief and implicit...

This book presents the groundbreaking Destructivist Poetics of multidisciplinary artist and scholar Tina Escaja. "Destructivismo," a movement founded by Escaja (AKA Alm@ Perez) in 2014 with a poetic action in Vicente Huidobro's grave, has become very influential in contemporary Spanish and Latin America poetry. It now comes to the English speaking world thanks to the work of renowned translator Kristin Dykstra. Definitely, this book is a must have for anyone interested in 21st Century poetics.

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,...