A momentous collection of poems about struggle and resistance, Rafael Alcides’s Poet in the Neighborhood (190 pages; Asterism), translated and selected by Pablo Medina, traces the solitude of voluntary internal exile by a Cuban poet who traverses his mother’s tragedies, bawdy humor, and prayerful conversation. (A few of the poems in the collection were published in ZYZZYVA Issue 127.) No stranger to myth, Alcides likens his mother to “a girl filled with illusion,” “laden with memories like Sinbad”, comparing her to La Gioconda and a Shakespearean tragedy as he mythologizes her history as a young woman in Havana. His own declarations of desire, as in “List of Things the Hands Know How to Do,” reach the height of their ardor in descriptions of a lover’s hands, the impassioned speaker murmuring of the primacy of touch: “and my hands search for you in the city, / they demolish you in street corners… and you are once again a dog, / maybe a mare, my love.”
Although Alcides co-founded the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC) in 1961, he found his work censured during Fidel Castro’s regime. In response, he retreated into his own private world, where he psychically—though not physically—experienced the hardships of exile. Nowhere is this clearer than in the poem “Exodus”: “Everyone is leaving, Lord,” Alcides repeats, as though dazed, questioning the dreams of those on the road and through simile painting their departures akin to those of “swallows and ducks when winter / comes.” Leaving, and those left behind, attests to the external realities of the society from which he has separated, while he demarcates the internal space he has constructed to house his reflections during times of political unrest.
The architecture of memory is a hauntingly familiar edifice, and Alcides uses this structure to reconstruct the world, both throughout his insilio (as opposed to exilio) and before leaving his position as chief press officer for the government. In “Cardboard Dream,” the speaker describes the “hole / where love and hope should be… Between the horror and tears / of waking, I am speaking to you, Lord.” The flimsy “great dream” is no more than a cardboard house, a ravaged city “being eaten by termites.” “Landscape after Battle” returns to the image of a city lost, providing a sense of coherence to the series of poems: “We tried to find the City of Dreams / and came upon wind, silence, oblivion.” He achingly gestures toward a desolate place, a space beholden to emptiness and waste. It is with such spare but poignant images that the poet invites the reader into his inner sanctum, with his loss presented as a gradual distancing, “as if saying goodbye to a dream… / an age, / an Atlantis sinking.”
Danielle Shi is a writer and photographer based in Berkeley, CA. Her work can be found at Michigan Quarterly Review: Mixtape, The Rumpus, La Piccioletta Barca, The Margins, and Common Forms.