About the Author:
Virgil Suarez is the author of the short story collection THE SOVIET CIRCUS COMES TO HAVANA (C&R Press, 2014), and the book of poems, IN THE REPUBLIC OF LONGING (Bilingual Review Press, 2000). He teaches in the English department at Florida State University.
From Booklist:
Suarez approaches his homeland, Cuba, through the scrim of Shakespeare's The Tempest, conjuring a Caliban wise in the ways of weather who reads history in sunlight and shadow, wood and sand. Scarred, silent, and bedeviled by his unrequited love for the pale, protected Miranda, Suarez's suffering, beachcombing savage merges with the island itself to form the consciousness that flows within these richly descriptive, sometimes melancholy, sometimes surreal lyrics. Adept at creating coded images, Suarez conducts a plangent disquisition into the Caribbean's anguished past within concise musings on the sea, the business of vultures, the lives of palms, and the grim realities of a "ruined river" and a crumbling city. Elsewhere, a man sets out on an inner tube with the impossible dream of reaching Florida, and a boy dives for coins tossed by tourists. The poet remembers watching Godzilla movies in L.A. as a boy, and understanding that for his mother the real monster is "that island in the Caribbean we'd left behind." Suarez's poems of place and displacement are sensual, mythic, and quietly trenchant. Donna Seaman
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