Description
Book SynopsisLegna Rodríguez Iglesias has quickly become one of the most celebrated Cuban poets writing today. Her intense – often confrontational – poetry refuses to conform, subverting expectations and challenging social mores. Particularly arresting is her uncomfortable focus on the human body, which she dramatises in isolation, stripping it of context, making it strange and even obscene. Alongside poems of extreme descriptive vigour, Rodríguez Iglesias irreverently skewers the hypocrisies, clichés and hierarchies of our time. This selection offers a broad survey of Rodríguez Iglesias’s work, drawing on eight previous collections in Spanish. Throughout, the poems are inflected with Cuban history and explore the tensions between the generation of the Revolution and her own. The consequences of poet’s long-term residence in Miami are forcefully brought home through poems of emigration and estrangement. The playfulness and verbal dexterity that marks Rodríguez Iglesias’s work in Spanish has been expertly brought to life in English by Abigail Parry, an award-winning poet whose debut collection Jinx was published by Bloodaxe in 2018, working in collaboration with bridge-translator and writer Serafina Vick.
Trade ReviewThe Poetry Translation Centre gives the best contemporary poems from Africa, Asia and Latin America a new life in the English language, working with diaspora communities for whom poetry is of great importance. By fostering creative collaborations between poets and translators, the PTC produces high-quality translations that extend the audience for international poetry.
Table of ContentsIntroduction 5 from Fertile Truce [2012] Fertile Truce 19 Memory is a bullet train 21 Thirty heads a day 23 Spoilt 25 Special Period 27 Eat 29 Rotten cherry 31 Mad dog pack 33 The cemetery 35 Canaan 37 from Transtucted [2017] 47 41 52 43 53 45 54 47 55 51 57 53 66 55 from Miami Century Fox [2017] Maggot people 59 Ms Trolley remembers countries 61 The day my girlfriend’s molars started hurting 63 You don’t say 65 Pure Jazz 67 The head that filled with water 69 What is my name? 71 Giddy-up Johnny 73 No flowers for me 75 from The Perfect Moment [2012] The day that I 79 The head I lost 81 Music for chameleons 85 Red room 87 Orange room 89 Blue room 93 White room 95 from Gum (Now is When) [2013] ‘Calm down…’ 99 ‘I wanted to do some sort of poetic exercise…’ 101 ‘The one tying…’ 103 ‘When a 25-day-old cat dies…’ 103 ‘At the core of every being…’ 105 ‘Truly, it is a shame…’ 107 ‘When I send off my poems…’ 107 ‘I must ask you…’ 109 from Dame Spray [2016] Kenozero 113 The Great Architect 115 An accumulation of dry matter that is slow after flowering but intensifies during the lactic phase 117 My girlfriend leaves for Cancún today 119 My girlfriend’s brother 121 Graduate 123 The quantity of water initially necessary to support the substratum is determined by its nature and dimensions 125 Grandpa Brecht 129 Bucket, rope, fire extinguisher, etc. 131 I’m making friends with all the police in the city so I can rob a bank with my water pistol 133 The importance of tolerance and its development 135 Farmer’s treasure 137 from Sucking the stone [2013] The good life 141 The ways 143 I don’t know how to put this 145 The law of dynamics 147 Sucking the stone 149 Kabuki theatre 151 Sucking the stone 153 The world of the senses 155 Four by four 157 from Thread+Thread [2015] The thread 161 To get what I’m given 163 Cold beneath the moon 165 The worst part 167 Lips 169 Easy 171 How the violin sounds 173 Kilometres 175 The house 177 I do not exist 179 The thread 181 Notes 183 About the Authors 187
