Alcides, Rafael / Medina, Pablo: Poet in the Neighborhood

Lavender Ink / Diálogos, paperback

Translated by: Pablo Medina

Publication Date: February 1, 2025

Publisher Marketing: In A Poet in the Neighborhood , Rafael Alcides, one of Cuba's most important poets, renders in verse the mood and rhythm of life from the 20th to 21st centuries—its everydayness punctured by exceptional moments of splendor, crisis, and oblivion. Selected by Pablo Medina, an esteemed Cuban American poet and novelist in his own right, these poems unfold scenes of love, violation, hunger, boredom, corruption, and regret, set against the backdrop of villages and cities and framed by grand and mundane subjects. Through these vivid portrayals, Alcides offers profound insights into the interplay of individual thought and larger sociopolitical forces. In Medina's masterful English translations, the original beauty and power of Alcides's Cuban Spanish resonate with equal aesthetic depth. —Jacqueline Loss, Co-editor, The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature

Alcides' poems are poems of the earth, Cuban earth, universal earth. They are filled with death and joy, love-making and memory, mother and son, water pump and community, boiling espaguetis, paradise, God/dream, hope, frustration, theater, silence, prayer. In a life both telenovela and all too real, Alcides plain-spoken and rapid, graceful poems give some of what poetry gives best: vision, clarity, connection. Medina's translations are a triumph, a conversation and collaboration between two poets with which this third poet is delighted. — Mark Statman , author of Hechizo