The Counterpunch (and Other Horizontal Poems)/El contragolpe (y otros poemas horizontales) [Paperback]

Mapping contemporary Cuba through the architecture of poetry and place.

Alamar, the home of award-winning Cuban poet Juan Carlos Flores, is the setting for his collection,The Counterpunch and Other Horizontal Poems) / El contragolpe (y otros poemas horizontales). Constructed as a self-help community in eastern Havana, Alamar is the largest housing complex in the world. Floress highly structured texts, organized into art galleries, present prose paintings of a big place in very small form.

Flores builds a poetic landscape with repeating structures that mirror Alamars five-floor walkups. Exploring life and dream on the flat surfaces of the poems, he gives fleeting glimpses of perception and survival at the urban margins. As the poet ages, so ages Alamar itself. Yet both find renewal through poetry.

The eighty poems in this bilingual edition offer the first English translation of a complete Flores collection. It will also be of interest to Spanish-language readers seeking access to Cuban literature abroad. Award-winning scholar and translator Kristin Dykstra has compiled an introduction in which she presents Flores, his literary contexts, and references in his poems. Because Flores made specific requests regarding translation, fascinating notes also clarify and expound on choices Dykstra makes in the English version.

The Counterpunch (and Other Horizontal Poems) / El contragolpe (y otros poemas horizontales)brings English-language readers into the distinctive poetic world of acclaimed Cuban writer Juan Carlos Flores. Set in Alamar, Havana's vast housing complex and a defining landscape of contemporary Cuban experience, these eighty poems transform everyday urban life into extraordinary literary art. Through inventive structures, sharp observations, and vivid prose-poetic imagery, Flores captures moments of survival, imagination, memory, and renewal at the margins of the city. Presented in a billC$