{"id":15310,"date":"2025-01-16T14:45:08","date_gmt":"2025-01-16T20:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lavenderink.org\/site\/?post_type=product&p=15310"},"modified":"2025-10-21T16:23:47","modified_gmt":"2025-10-21T21:23:47","slug":"poet-in-the-neighborhood","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/www.lavenderink.org\/site\/shop\/poet-in-the-neighborhood\/","title":{"rendered":"Poet in the Neighborhood: Selected Poems of Rafael Alcides"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rafael Alcides<\/a><\/h1>\n

Translated by\u00a0Pablo Medina<\/a><\/h2>\n

ISBN 978-1-956921-40-3 (pbk)<\/p>\n

188 pages: $22.95
\nFebruary, 2025<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

In\u00a0A Poet in the Neighborhood<\/i>, Rafael Alcides, one of Cuba\u2019s most important poets, renders in verse the mood and rhythm of life from the 20th to 21st centuries\u2014its everydayness punctured by exceptional moments of splendor, crisis, and oblivion.\u00a0 Selected by Pablo Medina, an esteemed Cuban American poet and novelist in his own right, these poems unfold scenes of love, violation, hunger, boredom, corruption, and regret, set against the backdrop of villages and cities and framed by grand and mundane subjects. Through these vivid portrayals, Alcides offers profound insights into the interplay of individual thought and larger sociopolitical forces. In Medina\u2019s masterful English translations, the original beauty and power of Alcides\u2019s Cuban Spanish resonate with equal aesthetic depth.<\/p>\n

\u2014Jacqueline Loss, Co-editor, The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Alcides\u2019 poems are poems of the earth, Cuban earth, universal earth. They are filled with death and joy, love-making and memory, mother and son, water pump and community, boiling\u00a0espaguetis,\u00a0<\/i>paradise, God\/dream, hope,\u00a0frustration, theater, silence, prayer. In a life both\u00a0telenovela<\/i>\u00a0and all too real, Alcides plain-spoken and rapid, graceful poems give some of what poetry gives best:\u00a0vision, clarity, connection.\u00a0Medina\u2019s translations are a triumph, a conversation and collaboration between two poets with which this third poet is delighted.<\/p>\n

\u2014Mark Statman<\/a>, author of Hechizo<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Rafael Alcides (1933-2018) started as a poet emphatically of the people and finished as a self-described stranger. His plain-spoken poems document an energetic vision ranging from the romantic, to the irreverent, to the sardonic. In earlier poems dating to the 1960s, Alcides dreams of \u201ccars full of women \/ traveling toward our arms,\u201d his hands inside all things comprising a youthful, seductive world. Then one day he perceives that a Soviet Lada sedan has become a sign of social mobility and writes about backing away from friends becoming bureaucrats. In the twenty-first\u00a0century, the poet speaks as one who sought faith yet \u201ccame upon wind, silence, oblivion.\u201d Poet-translator Pablo Medina has selected a series of poems that walk English-language readers down Alcides\u2019 well-known path to internal exile \u2013 stirring glimpses of how a \u201cworld fell apart \/ and recomposed itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014Kristin Dykstra, translator of\u00a0Other Letters to Milena<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Alcides\u2019s poetry hits you square in the chest and knocks the wind out of you. Medina\u2019s deft translation delivers the same punch. What a wondrous collection.<\/p>\n

\u2014Anna Kushner, translator of Marcial Gala, Leonardo Padura, Guillermo Rosales, and others<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Plainspoken but far from plain, these are poems of love and of disenchantment, of memory and invention, of the twists and turns of life and of characters not to be forgotten. Poems of the Cuban hinterland, of Havana, and of the cosmos. Poems of a lifetime, flaming moments and long views. The translations are as simple and as strange as the originals\u2014as steady as a stream and as jumpy as rapids when they need to be. And then suddenly, the longer lyrical world-weary poems, with soulful translations to\u00a0 match. I loved meeting Rafael Alcides\u2019 work by way of Pablo Medina\u2019s words.<\/p>\n

\u2014Dick Cluster, \u00a0translator of Paula Abramo\u2019s Fiat Lux\u00a0<\/i>and Gabriela Alem\u00e1n\u2019s\u00a0Poso Wells, <\/i>and author of The History of Havana<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rafael Alcides<\/a>
\nTranslated by Pablo Medina<\/a>
\n9781956921403
\n“Plainspoken but far from plain.” \u2014Dick Cluster<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":15317,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"product_brand":[],"product_cat":[17],"product_tag":[283,124,156,18,480,30],"class_list":{"0":"post-15310","1":"product","2":"type-product","3":"status-publish","4":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"product_cat-dialogos","7":"product_tag-bilingual","8":"product_tag-cuba","9":"product_tag-pablo-medina","10":"product_tag-poetry","11":"product_tag-rafael-alcides","12":"product_tag-spanish","14":"first","15":"instock","16":"taxable","17":"shipping-taxable","18":"purchasable","19":"product-type-simple","20":"berocket_lgv_grid","21":"berocket_lgv_list_grid"},"yoast_head":"\nPoet of the Neighborhood: Rafael Alcides at Lavender Ink \/ Di\u00e1logos<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Poet of the Neighborhood: Rafael Alcides translated by Pablo Medina. 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