Kirjahaku

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 Suárez'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 falls in torrents on corrugated tin roofs. On this island of fire, the Marquis de Sade joins other historical figures to drink absinthe, and J. Edgar Hoover lingers over mojitos and a cigar at the Tropicana Night Club in Old Havana. Hovering behind the hotel shutters or half-concealed behind their masks, the old poets and prophets--Shakespeare, Tiresias, Pablo Neruda--are waiting to speak their passions. Out of this rich imaginative brew, Suárez evokes the mythical and historical landscape of Cuba and distills the "hollow, deep-thudded pangs" of exile's rootlessness, the immigrant's constant longing to be possessed by a sense of place. Steeped in a seductive, incantatory language of desire, Guide to the Blue Tongue gives entry to a place of blue possibility and daily undoing, where the sting of salt-fresh air is compounded by the ache of displacement and loss.

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 meditative, he writes about ?the in-betweenness of spirit? of those who have left their home and must try to forge a new one in the United States. Invoking water, song, earth, and darkness, he seeks to create his place in the world a place for his family and his spirit to call home. He constructs a slippery camouflage of animals: fish-beings, turtles, chupacabras, birds. As Suarez's poem-stories drift from one form and species to another, these creatures reincarnate and retell their lives to each other and to us. Like the crows of Hialeah, Virgil Suarez sings of exile, of absence, of captured cities, lost love, and claimed lives. Palm Crows shows us an almost mythical Cuba, offering a compelling testament both to the immigrant experience and to our own search for home.

Ninety miles separate Cuba and Key West, Florida. Crossing that distance, thousands of Cubans have lost their lives. For Cuban American poet Virgil Su\u00e1rez, that expanse of ocean represents the state of exile, which he has imaginatively bridged in over two decades of compelling poetry.\u0022Whatever isn't voiced in time drowns,\u0022 Su\u00e1rez writes in \u0022River Fable,\u0022 and the urgency to articulate the complex yearnings of the displaced marks all the poems collected here. 90 Miles contains the best work from Su\u00e1rez's six previous collections: You Come Singing, Garabato, In the Republic of Longing, Palm Crows, Banyan, and Guide to the Blue Tongue, as well as important new poems.At once meditative, confessional, and political, Su\u00e1rez's work displays the refracted nature of a life of exile spent in Cuba, Spain, and the United States. Connected through memory and desire, Caribbean palms wave over American junk mail. Cuban mangos rot on Miami hospital trays. William Shakespeare visits Havana. And the ones who left Cuba plant trees of reconciliation with the ones who stayed.Courageously prolific, Virgil Su\u00e1rez is one of the most important Latino writers of his generation.

The Painted Bunting’s Last Molt explores fatherhood, parenting, and separation anxiety; and the ways in which time and memory are both a prison and a giver of joy. Fifteen years in the making, Virgil Suárez’s new collection uses his mother’s return to Cuba after 50 years of exile as a catalyst to muse on familial relationships, death, and the passing of time.

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.