Description
Book SynopsisAlamar, 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). Flores’s highly structured texts, organised into “art galleries,” present prose paintings of a big place in very small form.
Trade Review“Kristin Dykstra’s translation of Cuban poet Juan Carlos Flores’s El Contragolpe (y otros poemas horizontales) breathes interpretive and musical life into the exciting syncopated prose poetry written by an author whose voice is genuinely distinctive among that island’s post-revolutionary generation. As well, Dykstra’s work is a solid scholarly contribution. It features rigorous translator’s notes and an essay that frames the work in its social circumstances and historical moment. Dykstra is widely recognized as one of our most accomplished translators devoted to contemporary poetry of Latin America. This translation will be welcomed by specialists in the field and general readers of poetry, as well as by those devoted more broadly to Cuban arts and culture.” — Roberto Tejada, coeditor of the journal
Mandoria: New Writing from the Americas and author of
National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment, Celia Alvarez Muñoz, and the poetry collection Exposition Park“Kristin Dykstra’s translation of Juan Carlos Flores’s El contragolpe (y otros poemas horizontales) is a major literary event; it provides a complex and formally innovative understanding for the lives and culture of a distinct locale. Dykstra’s translations are superb, and her concluding essay and notes are profoundly informative.”—Hank Lazer, author of
Lyric & Spirit, as well as seventeen volumes of poetry including
N18 and
Portions
