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 Suárez'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, Suárez 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.
