Beneath the Spanish

by Victor Hernandez Cruz

Overview

Praise for Victor Hernández Cruz:

"Bilingual since childhood, Mr. Cruz writes poems about his native Puerto Rico and elsewhere which often speak to us with a forked tongue, sometimes in a highly literate Spanglish. . . . He's a funny, hard-edged poet, declining always into mother wit and pathos." —The New York Times Book Review

"A fluent sensualist and rhythmic stylist." —The Washington Post

"Like a salsa band leader coaxing and challenging dancers to more and more complex steps, Cruz dares readers with dizzying polyrhythms, polymetric stanzas, backstepping word structures and a sense of improvisation." —Publishers Weekly

Beneath the Spanish tracks the way that languages intersect and inform each other, and how language and music shapes experience. Moving across landscapes from Puerto Rico to Manhattan to Morocco, these poems are one man's history and a song that begs to be performed.

From "Ay Bendito, Que Vaina":

Cuneiform tablet inside,
The maracas pencil orality
of remembered places,
the night stars,
the hammock, yucayeques
like beehives, a river crab
came to my feet to talk
with its mouth legs,
trembling like castanets.

Victor Hernández Cruz is the author of several collections of poetry including, most recently, The Mountain in the Sea and In the Shadow of Al-Andalus. Featured in Bill Moyers's Language of Life series, Cruz's collection, Maraca, was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall and Griffin Poetry Prizes. He divides his time between Morocco and his native Puerto Rico.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781566894890
Publisher:	Coffee House Press
Publication date:	10/10/2017
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Victor Hernández Cruz is the author of several collections of poetry including, most recently, The Mountain in the Sea and In the Shadow of Al-Andalus. His highly acclaimed first book, Snaps, was published the year he turned nineteen. Featured in Bill Moyers’s Language of Life series, Cruz’s collection, Maraca, was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall and Griffin Poetry Prizes. His legendary dynamic reading ability has led to him being twice crowned as the World Heavyweight Poetry Champion in Taos. Cruz was born in Puerto Rico and moved to New York at the age of five. After teaching for many years in the San Francisco Bay area, he has recently returned to the place of his birth. He now divides his time between Morocco and his native Puerto Rico.

Table of Contents

Proloco xi

Tumbadora 1

Primer Encuentro entre Dos Mundos 6

Cuban Taino Cacique Meets Spaniard and the Translator 9

Santo Domingo/Puerto Rico: New Dance Commences 15

Ay Bandito, Qué Vaina 19

Atlantis/Mu 23

Bajo Mundo 28

Hispano Caribbean/America Latin 33

Childhood in the Latin Caribbean 36

San Agustin/Florida 41

More Nuevo Mundo 43

What Is the Lower East Side 47

Lower East Side Red Brick Blues 49

New Orleans y Todo Ese Jazz 53

Motion in the Silence 56

Egypt 62

Sopdet 64

Tobacco-Guayaba y Café 70

Son las Tres del Café 73

Chocolate 76

Choco-Arte 78

San Juan Bautista 80

Puerto Rico 83

Borges y Nabokov 87

Lectura 90

Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca 96

Cante Jondo 98

Don Quijote 102

The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha 105

Reading Japanese in Morocco 108

Chuchuki 110

Chess 114

Ajedrez 117

Spanish Language 121

Latin Boogaloo 124

Sueiios 135

Who/What/Where 137

The Costumes of Peasant Folk 142

Future Mountain 145

Latin American Dance 151

La Pachanga 156

Editorial Reviews

12/04/2017
Moving among Puerto Rico, New York, and Morocco, Hernández Cruz (The Mountain in the Sea) records landscapes, languages, and cultures bound by the intermingling and boundary-transcending of mestizaje. Quotidian pleasures—including music, food, and chess—reveal a long global history of exchange. “My mother always made coffee at 3 p.m.,” Hernández Cruz writes, recalling that “she maintained this habit throughout our exile in New York, many years almost thirty.” This traditional Caribbean affair was an occasion for the poet to hear family stories that traced the interplay of the tobacco rituals of “our Taino ancestors” and the coffee bean that “they say comes from Africa.” Hernández Cruz, who sprinkles his English with Spanish, revels in the flavors, sounds, and styles brought about by cultural overlap while also attending to the history of conquest and slavery in which they are forged. He explores each object of focus in the book via twinned compositions—one prose, one poetry. Influenced by jazz, Hernández Cruz uses the prose pieces to introduce his themes and the poems to riff and improvise. Arriving in a historical moment fixated on migration and borders, this book comes as a salve, reminding readers that, when looking for any origin story, “The more you go/ The more you come back.” (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

FROM “PUERTO RICO”:

“To the bad times
give a happy face,
place a red amapola
in your black dark hair.
Revive the mummies,
the dead,
burst the bodies
out of the coffins
let’s all walk to the plaza
this final time”

Reviews

“Short, punchy lines with telescoped syntax set the ongoing beat… A solid selection for neophytes and Cruz’s fans alike.” —Library Journal

“From one of the world’s most eminent poets, Beneath the Spanish is a trumpeting source to draw from in this unsteady time. This book is a virtual encyclopedia of poetics histories in colonial resistances. Thoroughly steeped in signature inimitable musicality and flourishing image verse, this encompassing, jazz-inspired, paramount collection brings us to our knees and delivers us back into the beauty of life amidst all its human complications and conditions. Into the spirit stains, perfumes, and lingual intensities bridging migrations, languages, and cultures to reel in lucidity and create a balancing nest of home. A socially artistic creation by a seasoned genius, Beneath the Spanish is on time, in time, and Victor Hernández Cruz delivers one of the most gorgeously stunning and remarkable contributions to the canon to date. Go on, lose yourself in this.” —Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, author of Streaming

"Beneath the Spanish celebrates the evolution and musicality of language by taking you on a journey through the landscapes and cultures that formed the poet and his own bilingual expressions of self: Puerto Rico, California, New York, and Morocco." —Bustle

“...exuberant, spontaneous, fast-paced…” —American Poets

“...Victor Hernandez Cruz’s Beneath the Spanish is a vibrant poetic manifesto designed to unite the scattered indigenous peoples of the world.” —The Journal

From the Publisher

11/15/2017
A Lenore Marshall and Griffin Poetry Prize finalist, Cruz was born in Puerto Rico and raised in New York and now splits his time between his homeland and Morocco. That's no coincidence; throughout this energized volume, the connections between Africa and the Caribbean are made vividly real, with Spain standing in the background. "My foot wants to danza South/ Sahara down" he says buoyantly; later, we see "Andalusian black hair/ Arabic culos night thighs/ of moon circles" in a poem citing Lorca, Jiménez, and Dalí. Short, punchy lines with telescoped syntax set the ongoing beat. VERDICT A solid selection for neophytes and Cruz's fans alike.

Library Journal