Furia
by Orlando Ricardo Menes
Furia propels the reader into a world in which maids serve
monkeys for dinner, elementary-school thugs wield knives, and frogs
fall from the sky. Filled with colors, textures, tastes, and
beautifully crafted language, the poems explore family history, both
immediate and remote, from an early childhood in Peru to south Florida
in the 1950s and reaching back to ancestors in Cuba, including a
great-great-grandfather, who was a Chinese coolie from Canton.
Drawing from history, ethnography, and anthropology, Furia
speaks to Afro-Cuban heritage, magic, syncretic religion, and legacies
of displacement and assimilation. With a poetic style that centers on
narrative, the lyric, and dramatic monologue, the collection moves
between a life with rich ancestry but little freedom, and another that
offers freedom but at a cost.
Orlando Ricardo Menes
Author's Bio:Orlando Ricardo Menes is the author of a previous book of poetry, Rumba Atop the Stones, published in the United Kingdom, and is editor of Renaming Ecstasy: Latino Writings on the Sacred. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Antioch Review, Chelsea, Spoon River Poetry Review, New Letters, and Green Mountains Review.
He has translated the work of Argentine poet Alfonsina Storni and Cuban
Jos - Kozer. Born in Lima, Peru, to Cuban parents, he has lived most of
his life in the United States. He received his Ph.D. from the
University of Illinois at Chicago and is currently assistant professor
at University of Notre Dame.
Quotes:“There is lush music to Menes’s first book, and this lushness may
arise from his subject, namely the Caribbean islands, particularly
Cuba, his parents’ homeland. He writes of its populace—the dock worker,
the sugar cane worker, the worker slaving at all trades—and the
loveliness of the island’s ecosystems, along with its religions. These
are bewitching poems with beguiling vocabulary. . . . In these words alone, we have the mystery of
poetry.”—Gary Soto, Ploughshares |
Price:
$ 14.95
Binding: Paper
Availability In Stock: 224
immediately
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 2005
Size: 6 x 9
Genre: Poetry
Pages: 104
ISBN: 9781571314208
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