MARY CONWAY revels in a powerful reminder that human lives are not defined by physical perfection
CUBA has always attracted the passionate sympathies of poets everywhere. “Cuba, my love, they put you on the rack,” wrote Pablo Neruda in Canto General, “cut your face, pried open your legs of pale gold, crushed your pomegranate sex, stabbed you with knives, dismembered you, burned you.”
The country’s national poets, Jose Marti and Nicolas Guillen, were revolutionaries and Che Guevara was also a poet.
After the fall of Batista, poets like Allen Ginsberg, Nazim Hikmet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Hans Magnus Enzensberger visited Cuba to write about the revolution.
From post-human revolution in Puerto Rico to trans poetics and queer mythmaking, these three books that imagine new ways of being together
ROGER D HARRIS and SARA FLOUNDERS challenge propaganda against the blockaded socialist island
A teaching delegation to Cuba offered IAN DUCKETT a powerful glimpse into a schooling system defined by care, creativity and the legacy of the island’s remarkable 1961 literacy campaign
ANDY CROFT rallies poets to the impossible task of speaking truth to a tin-eared politician


