The Avant Ricuas: A Cross-Generational Poetry Bombessa

Featuring

Victor Hernandez Cruz

Urayoan Noel

and Edwin Torres

This event is a reading, performance, and discussion among three Puerto Rican luminaries, celebrating the publication of Hernandez’ new book, “Beneath The Spanish” (Coffee House Press). It will take place at our Center on Wednesday, October 25th at 6:30pm

ABOUT THE BOOK 

Beneath the Spanish is history, the clash and melt of cultures, the conquest of the New World, colonialism, bilingualism, fragmentation, and cubism. Poems built of tobacco, sugar, café; Spanish, Arabic, English; José Martí, Federico García Lorca, and William Carlos Williams. A history and exploration of Hernández Cruz’s Caribbean roots as well as a documentation of and counterpoint to the origin of the European cultural intrusion into the New World, Beneath the Spanish deconstructs and reconstructs a wounded history, offering a prayer for communication between distances, oceans, music, dance, and mountains, revealing the past in the present moment we live. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

VICTOR HERNANDEZ CRUZ is the author of several collections of poetry including, most recently, The Mountain in the Sea and In the Shadow of AlAndalus. 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.