Published in Spanish as Otras cartas a Milena, Other Letters to Milena shows Rodríguez confronting pressing issues at the turn of the twenty-first century. These involve a new post-Soviet world and the realities of diasporic existence, which have a profound effect even on people like Rodríguez who have not migrated but continue to live and work in their home nation. The book’s title references Franz Kafka, whose Letters to Milena was published after his death in 1952. This signals that Rodríguez participates in her city’s long cosmopolitan tradition asserted by Cuban writers and scholars of Cuban literature. Rodríguez’s youngest daughter, featured most prominently in the letters making up the collection’s centerpiece, “A Girl’s Story,” was named after Milena Jesenská, the recipient of Kafka’s letters. With the poems provided in a bilingual format, the collection will be of interest both to English readers in general (this will be the first English translation of a complete Rodríguez collection not excerpted from a larger work) and to Spanish readers unable to obtain the collection in any form, given the difficulty of distributing Cuban literature outside that country. As an introduction to the book, Dykstra has included a critical commentary. It clarifies many of the author’s references, such as details pertaining to her family history―items Dykstra learned during lengthy discussions with the author about her work―and influences about her choices in the translation. Available directly from the University of Alabama Press is a deluxe edition that includes a handmade, limited-edition color linocut print and letterpress-printed poem signed by both Rodríguez and artist Alejandro Sainz. To purchase a copy of this unique item, select the "Other Book" above.

Other Letters to Milena / Otras cartas a Milena

Literature & Fiction

Rodríguez, Reina María

Dykstra, Kristin

Poetry

University Alabama Press

Coloqué sobre la mesa varios libros publicados por poetas de la «Bella». Me tumbé sobre el camastro como un Rey de los suburbios y sin mucho que exigirme comencé. Qué decepción. ¿Una poesía del lenguaje? ¿Qué lenguaje? ¿Un compendio de lo bello? ¿Qué belleza? De aquellas «maravillas» me quedé con «cuatro gatos», los otros con el fuego se expiaron. Oscar Cruz Autores: Soleida Ríos Reina María Rodríguez Juan Carlos Flores Carlos Augusto Alfonso Omar Pérez José Ramón Sánchez Marcelo Morales Oscar Cruz Jamila Medina Ríos Javier L. Mora Legna Rodríguez Iglesias

The cuban team: Los once poetas cubanos (Spanish Edition)

Pérez, Omar

Flores, Juan Carlos

Ríos, Soleida

Sánchez, José Ramón

Morales, Marcelo

Alfonso, Carlos Augusto

Cruz, Oscar

Medina, Jamila

Mora, Javier L.

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Poetry. Translated from the Spanish by Kristin Dykstra. Bilingual Edition. Reina María Rodríguez is the author of many books of poetry and prose—and something of a living legend in Havana's literary world. These poems are selected from En la arena de Padua (Ediciones Unión, 1992), the book that established the language of crisis for which she is known today. Haunting poems explore the ghosts of people, places, economies, and time itself. Includes a translator's note by Dykstra and an afterward by Roberto Tejada that together help situate Rodríguez (and other recent Cuban poetry) in historical terms. "Reina María Rodríguez sings across borders of real bodies and image nations. A critical voice for a poetics of the Americas hundreds of years in the making, Rodríguez's poems overflow with insistent rhythms of everyday, refracted by a hundred mirrors facing inward, adjacent, beyond; turning on the promise of each next line. This poetry expresses the necessity not of phrase or stanza, not of breath or idea... but of motion."—Charles Bernstein.

La detencion del tiempo / Time's Arrest

Factory School

Born in Havana in 1952, Reina María Rodriguez developed her poetry in a cultural climate that could be both encouraging and tense. Over the years she struggled to establish a questioning, experimental poetics that has both expressed and questioned -values of contemporary Cuban culture. Winner of the Casa de las Americas prize of poetry, the UNEAC Prize, and the Julián del Casal prize, Rodriguez is recognized today as one of the most -outstanding of Cuban writers.

Violet Island and Other Poems (Green Integer)

History & Criticism

Green Integer

A meditation on the power and limitations of images, The Winter Garden Photograph began as an homage to a magazine, The Courier, published by UNESCO. Reina María Rodríguez used the magazine's photographs of faraway places to spark an investigation of the mental landscapes comprising her own, contemporary Havana. I think through / the breath in you; I think through / the blood in you: precisely in striving to inhabit other worlds, she pursues the self. With the original Cuban edition of this book, Rodríguez won her second Casa de las Américas Prize for Poetry.This edition includes a set of co-translations by Dykstra and Nancy Gates Madsen, and an interview with Rodríguez, conducted by Rosa Alcalá.

The Winter Garden Photograph

Ugly Duckling Presse

Reina María Rodríguez (La Habana, 1952) recibió en 2014 el Premio Iberoamericano de Poesía Pablo Neruda por el conjunto de su obra. Entre sus títulos más relevantes se cuentan Para un cordero blanco (1984, Premio Casa de las Américas), En la arena de Padua (1992, Premio Nacional de la Crítica), Páramos (1993, Premio Julián del Casal y Premio Nacional de la Crítica), La foto del invernadero (1998, Premio Casa de las Américas) y Bosque negro (2004). Reside en La Habana.

El piano

Bokeh

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