Keywords: Poetry, Home, Family, Memories, Contemporary Spanish-Language Poetry.
JIGS & LURES :
Selected Poems
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Reina María Rodríguez
English-Spanish
Foreword and English translations by Kristin Dykstra
2024
Hardcover | 206 pages | 5.5 x 8.5 inches
Paperback | 206 pages | 5.5 x 8.5 inches
I have seen fish who sink like men,
conchs shattered
and the curse of the animal
who exhausts its sense of purpose between my fingers.
I’ve said scale
so as not to say absence of the desire
to touch things that are
transcendent.
— Reina María Rodríguez
At the heart of this edition are poems from the prizewinning collection Catch and Release (2006). Rodríguez opens by presenting the writer herself as a character, demonstrating a new iteration of distance from herself. In its first text, Rodríguez outlines “the cutout doll of a writer, a character (not skeletal or sentimental or radical or committed).”
By explicitly discarding those descriptions, each associated with earlier images and idealizations of writers, Rodríguez asserts an aesthetic identity for her writer doll only in the duration of her search for an intangible future: creative endurance is itself the wellspring of survival.
— Kristin Dykstra
REINA MARÍA RODRÍGUEZ (Havana, 1952) is the author of more than thirty books and a major figure in contemporary Spanish-language poetry. Her most recent collections include Dársenas (Ediciones Furtivas, 2022), Cortar las muñecas (ebook from Institute for Creative Exchange Americas, 2022), Achicar (U. Autónoma de Querétaro, 2021), Luciérnagas (U. Autónoma de Querétaro, 2017), and The Winter Garden Photograph / La foto del invernadero (bilingual; Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019). Among other awards too numerous to list in full, Rodríguez holds two Casas de las Américas Awards for poetry (1984, 1998), the Alejo Carpentier Medal for Cuban literature (2002), the Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Award (2014), and Cuba’s National Prize for Literature (2013). Rodríguez is known in and beyond Cuba for her history of advocacy for independent artistic spaces. She was named a finalist for the 2022 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, an honorary member of the Modern Language Association in 2021 for her distinguished contributions to the field of literature, and chevalier in France’s Order of Arts and Letters in 1999. The Princeton University Library holds her papers.