City of a Hundred Fires
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Blanco, Richard, PUBLISHER: University of Pittsburgh Press, City of a Hundred Fires presents us with a journey through the cultural coming of age experiences of the hyphenated Cuban-American. This distract group, known as the Generation (as coined by Bill Teck), are the bilingual children of Cuban exiles nourished by two cultural currents -- the fragmented traditions and transferred nostalgia of their parents' Caribbean homeland and the very real and present America where they grew up and live. There is a Caribbean lushness and rhythm in these poems with characters like "Sarita in her porous eggshell skin....the soft balls of her feet and strawberry toenails seeping from under the edges of sheets swirled around her contours like icing". But there is also a sense of wistfulness and proud self-invention addressed formally through languages and style, with individual poems effortlessly combining Spanish and English into an understandable text. The journey ends in this self-invention, a mosaic assembled from fragments of culture, history, and language, fractured but whole.