90 Miles

Ninety miles separate Cuba and Key West, Florida. Crossing that distance, thousands of Cubans have lost their lives. For Cuban American poet Virgil Suarez, that expanse of ocean represents the state of exile, which he has imaginatively bridged in over two decades of compelling poetry. "Whatever isn't voiced in time drowns," Suarez writes in "River Fable," and the urgency to articulate the complex yearnings of the displaced marks all the poems collected here. "90 Miles" contains the best work from Suarez'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, Suarez'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 Suarez is one of the most important Latino writers of his generation.