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 […]
The Architecture of Memory: ‘Poet in the Neighborhood: Selected Poems of Rafael Alcides’
by Danielle Shi
