Description: A Spanish-English dual-language anthology featuring poets from Cuba's "Generation Zero," including Luis Yuseff, Isaily Pérez González, Javier Marimón Miyares, Leymen Pérez García, Marcelo Morales Cintero, Oscar Cruz, Liuvan Herrera Carpio, Jamila Medina Ríos, Moisés Mayán Fernández, Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, and Sergio García Zamora.
Brief description: Katherine M. Hedeen is a specialist in Latin American poetry and has both written extensively on and translated contemporary authors from the region. Her translations include collections by Rodolfo Alonso, Juan Bañuelos, Juan Calzadilla, Juan Gelman, Fayad Jamís, Hugo Mujica, José Emilio Pacheco, Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, and Ida Vitale, among many others. She is the Poetry Translation Editor for the Kenyon Review and a two-time recipient of a NEA Translation Project Grant. She resides in Ohio where she is Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College.
Review Quotes:
"In the Drying Shed of Souls: Poetry from Cuba's Generation Zero, with its focus on poets born after 1970, offers a poignant sampling of some of the most exciting writing being produced in Cuba RIGHT NOW! Coming of age during the economic struggle of Cuba's Special Period, these writers show no patterns of allegiance to the ideological or aesthetic camps that have defined the Cuban literary world before and after the Revolution. Taken together, these poems advance the rich tradition of Cuban poetry. The selection is finely edited and remarkably translated by Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, poets, scholars, translators and avid chroniclers of contemporary Latin American letters. The poems in this anthology interrogate the nation and its history; exile; the richness and poverty of language; the visceral realities of the body; domestic violence; and epistemology and the nature of meaning, among other themes. To read them is to get an indelible sense of a Cuban poetry scene that is formally dazzling, civically critical, and deeply engaged with the question of what a poem can mean to a public. In their erudite and provocative introduction, Hedeen and Rodríguez Núñez assert that contemporary Cuban poetry gets largely ignored both in the Spanish-speaking world and in North America because of its failure to adhere to literary and sociological expectations. In the Drying Shed of Souls demands that we take these writers on their own terms, as poets who have built a stunning and urgent body of work that is personal, universal, political, philosophical, and unafraid."
-- Daniel Borzutzky, 2016 National Book Award Winner