Guide to the Blue Tongue: POEMS (Illinois Poetry Series)

Shimmering with saturated color and heat, Guide to the Blue Tongue is an intoxicating sequence of memory poems about growing up in the tropics, threaded through the myth of Caliban from Shakespeare's The Tempest. 
Caliban is the monstrous native, in love with what he cannot possess, lost to his own sense of identity. In Virgil Su‡rez's vision, the island of Caliban's imprisonment merges with the island of Cuba, where the carboneros make charcoal and sell it door-to-door by the pound, young boxers crackle with caged energy, dock workers spill like ants out of the bellies of ships, and the rain falls in torrents on corrugated tin roofs. On this island of fire, the Marquis de Sade joins other historical figures to drink absinthe, and J. Edgar Hoover lingers over mojitos and a cigar at the Tropicana Night Club in Old Havana. Hovering behind the hotel shutters or half-concealed behind their masks, the old poets and prophets--Shakespeare, Tiresias, Pablo Neruda--are waiting to speak their passions. 
Out of this rich imaginative brew, Su‡rez evokes the mythical and historical landscape of Cuba and distills the "hollow, deep-thudded pangs" of exile's rootlessness, the immigrant's constant longing to be possessed by a sense of place. Steeped in a seductive, incantatory language of desire, Guide to the Blue Tongue gives entry to a place of blue possibility and daily undoing, where the sting of salt-fresh air is compounded by the ache of displacement and loss.

Literature & Fiction

Suárez, Virgil

United States

University of Illinois Press

Shimmering with saturated color and heat, Guide to the Blue Tongue is an intoxicating sequence of memory poems about growing up in the tropics, threaded through the myth of Caliban from Shakespeare's The Tempest. Caliban is the monstrous native, in love with what he cannot possess, lost to his own sense of identity. In Virgil Surez's vision, the island of Caliban's imprisonment merges with the island of Cuba, where the carboneros make charcoal and sell it door-to-door by the pound, young boxers crackle with caged energy, dock workers spill like ants out of the bellies of ships, and the rain falls in torrents on corrugated tin roofs. On this island of fire, the Marquis de Sade joins other historical figures to drink absinthe, and J. Edgar Hoover lingers over mojitos and a cigar at the Tropicana Night Club in Old Havana. Hovering behind the hotel shutters or half-concealed behind their masks, the old poets and prophets--Shakespeare, Tiresias, Pablo Neruda - are waiting to speak their passions. landscape of Cuba and distills the hollow, deep-thudded pangs of exile's rootlessness, the immigrant's constant longing to be possessed by a sense of place. Steeped in a seductive, incantatory language of desire, Guide to the Blue Tongue gives entry to a place of blue possibility and daily undoing, where the sting of salt-fresh air is compounded by the ache of displacement and loss.

Poetry

Julian Campos, a young Cuban who had been sent to the countryside to cut sugar cane when his parents left the country, will risk everything when he hears of a boat that could take him to the United States

The Cutter

Ballantine Books

This tale of three generations of a Cuban-American family examines how they try to maintain the memories of their homeland, yet succeed in America

Latin Jazz

Fireside

Captures the experience of three generations of a family during the Cuban boat exodus from Mariel--grandfather Esteban safely settled in California, his daughter and son-in-law and his grandson, all seeking the good life on American soil

William Morrow & Co.

Banyan: Poems

Like the tree of its title, Virgil Suarez's dazzling new sequence of poems sends tendrils of memory and desire deep into the rich soil of a Havana childhood and the post-Revolution Cuban diaspora. Amid the uncertainty and loss of immigrant exile in Florida, where "a father's hand clutches / any dirt it can call its own," the single trunk of the banyan sends branches downward into the earth to become themselves sturdy trunks--fathers and sons, same fibers, same blood.  Incantatory, grounded in lush physical detail, BANYAN evokes the Cuba of history as well as a lost mythic landscape remembered by a son who has "learned this intricate art of leaving, / of saying good-bye to everything home, memories / like fire, a leaver's good-bye to all things irretrievable." Poised between loss and the restless search for identity and rootedness, these memories are sometimes searing but more often allow a son to generate "the music that has saved us all from ruin, / madness, bloodshed, from dying, from bitterness."  One of the first of such poetry collections written in English by Cubans/Cuban Americans living in the United States, BANYAN is an efflorescing testament to the nature of immigration and the quest for a father and a sense of place.

Louisiana State Univ Pr

Latin Jazz blends Anglo and Hispanic tempos as it chronicles a Cuban emigre family's hopes and sorrows in making a new home in Los Angeles. Men from three generations alternate in telling their family story, which culminates in the dramatic refugee boat lift from Mariel Harbor, Cuba, to Miami in 1980: Hugo, a political prisoner still trying to escape Cuba for America; his father, Esteban, settled almost twenty years in California but longing to return his wife's ashes to their homeland; Angel, Esteban's son-in-law, who dreams of bigger things than the ice-cream truck concession he operates in L.A.; and Angel's son, Diego, who soothes a vague sense of unrootedness with cocaine, sex, and alcohol. Exuding both bravura and pensiveness, Latin Jazz speaks insistently and clearly to the Cuban-American exile experience.

Latin Jazz (Voices of the South)

Hibiscus, banyan trees, and royal palms. Mango jam, white slices of sugarcane, and oxtail stew. Childhood games with fireflies and snail shells. These are images of a Cuba that many remember and others have never known, captured here in the powerful poems of Virgil Suárez.   Born in Havana in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, Suárez is now one of more than a million Cubans living in the United States. In Palm Crows Suárez offers a compelling canción of loss, longing, and memory as he explores the meaning of exile. In poems that range from playful and fantastic to elegiac and meditative, he writes about “the in-betweenness of spirit” of those who have left their home and must try to forge a new one in the United States.  Palm Crows shows us an almost mythical Cuba, offering a compelling testament both to the immigrant experience and to our own search for home.

Palm Crows (Camino del Sol)

University of Arizona Press

Ninety miles separate Cuba and Key West, Florida. Crossing that distance, thousands of Cubans have lost their lives. For Cuban American poet Virgil Suárez, 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," Suárez 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 Suárez'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, Suárez'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 Suárez is one of the most important Latino writers of his generation.

90 Miles: Selected And New Poems (Pitt Poetry Series)

History & Criticism

University of Pittsburgh Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Suárez, Virgil. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Suárez, Virgil

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Suárez, Virgil. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Guide to the Blue Tongue: POEMS (Illinois Poetry Series)

Guide to the Blue Tongue: POEMS (Illinois Poetry Series)

The Cutter

Latin Jazz

Latin Jazz

Banyan: Poems

Banyan: Poems

Latin Jazz (Voices of the South)

Palm Crows (Camino del Sol)

90 Miles: Selected And New Poems (Pitt Poetry Series)