Virgil Suarez – författare

Shimmering with saturated color and heat, Guide to the Blue Tongue is an intoxicating sequence of memory poems about growing up in the tropics, threaded through the myth of Caliban from Shakespeare's The Tempest.  Caliban is the monstrous native, in love with what he cannot possess, lost to his own sense of identity. In Virgil SuÁrez's vision, the island of Caliban's imprisonment merges with the island of Cuba, where the carboneros make charcoal and sell it door-to-door by the pound, young boxers crackle with caged energy, dock workers spill like ants out of the bellies of ships, and the rain falls in torrents on corrugated tin roofs. On this island of fire, the Marquis de Sade joins other historical figures to drink absinthe, and J. Edgar Hoover lingers over mojitos and a cigar at the Tropicana Night Club in Old Havana. Hovering behind the hotel shutters or half-concealed behind their masks, the old poets and prophets--Shakespeare, Tiresias, Pablo Neruda--are waiting to speak their passions.  Out of this rich imaginative brew, SuÁrez evokes the mythical and historical landscape of Cuba and distills the "hollow, deep-thudded pangs" of exile's rootlessness, the immigrant's constant longing to be possessed by a sense of place. Steeped in a seductive, incantatory language of desire, Guide to the Blue Tongue gives entry to a place of blue possibility and daily undoing, where the sting of salt-fresh air is compounded by the ache of displacement and loss.

Ninety miles separate Cuba and Key West, Florida. Crossing that distance, thousands of Cubans have lost their lives. For Cuban American poet Virgil Su\u00e1rez, that expanse of ocean represents the state of exile, which he has imaginatively bridged in over two decades of compelling poetry. \u0022Whatever isn't voiced in time drowns,\u0022 Su\u00e1rez writes in \u0022River Fable,\u0022 and the urgency to articulate the complex yearnings of the displaced marks all the poems collected here. 90 Miles contains the best work from Su\u00e1rez's six previous collections: You Come Singing, Garabato, In the Republic of Longing, Palm Crows, Banyan, and Guide to the Blue Tongue, as well as important new poems. At once meditative, confessional, and political, Su\u00e1rez's work displays the refracted nature of a life of exile spent in Cuba, Spain, and the United States. Connected through memory and desire, Caribbean palms wave over American junk mail. Cuban mangos rot on Miami hospital trays. William Shakespeare visits Havana. And the ones who left Cuba plant trees of reconciliation with the ones who stayed. Courageously prolific, Virgil Su\u00e1rez is one of the most important Latino writers of his generation.

The Painted Bunting’s Last Molt explores fatherhood, parenting, and separation anxiety; and the ways in which time and memory are both a prison and a giver of joy. Fifteen years in the making, Virgil Suárez’s new collection uses his mother’s return to Cuba after 50 years of exile as a catalyst to muse on familial relationships, death, and the passing of time.Moon DecimaIf it were the Eucharist, it’d be hard to swallow,this moon of lost impressions, a boy in deep water,something tickling his skin. This memory of weight-lessness—a kite that somehow still manages to hoverin the dog mouth blackness of sky. This is a cut outmoon of lost children, or is it a savior’s moon?This boy will float on home, or be swallowedby the water. Above the pines and mangroves,this moon hangs unrelenting. Is it the one eyeof an indifferent God that remains open just so?