English PEN Award Winner
Shortlisted for The Premio Valle Inclán for Spanish Translation 2020
Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2020

Legna Rodríguez Iglesias has quickly become one of the most celebrated Cuban poets writing today. Her intense – often confrontational – poetry refuses to conform, subverting expectations and challenging social mores. Particularly arresting is her uncomfortable focus on the human body, which she dramatises in isolation, stripping it of context, making it strange and even obscene. Alongside poems of extreme descriptive vigour, Rodríguez Iglesias irreverently skewers the hypocrisies, clichés and hierarchies of our time.

This selection offers a broad survey of Rodríguez Iglesias’s work, drawing on eight previous collections in Spanish. Throughout, the poems are inflected with Cuban history and explore the tensions between the generation of the Revolution and her own. The consequences of the poet’s long-term residence in Miami are forcefully brought home through poems of emigration and estrangement.

The exceptional skill and formal dexterity that marks Rodríguez Iglesias’s work in Spanish has been expertly brought to life in English through collaboration between Serafina Vick and Abigail Parry.

"... Parry is supremely alert to Rodríguez Iglesias’s jesting spirit, and brings a tricksy playfulness of her own to these poems...What strikes me most is the confidence with which Rodríguez Iglesias asserts her place as a writer - chin aloft, harpooning cliché and tackling her own estrangements."
- Martha Sprackland, Modern Poetry in Translation

ISBN: 9781780374963
Format: Paperback
Size: 216 x 138mm, 192 pages
Languages: Spanish, English
Co-publisher: Bloodaxe Books