Taking its title from Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, Leslie
Sainz's Have You Been Long Enough at Table explores the personal and
historical tragedies of the Cuban American experience through a
distinctly feminine lens. Formally diverse--including prose poems,
American sonnets, and persona poems--with echoes of Spanish throughout,
this debut collection critiques power and patriarchy as weaponized by
the governments of the United States and the Republic of Cuba. In
investigating the realities of displacement and inherited exile, Sainz
honors her imagined past, present, and future as a result of the
"revolution within the revolution,"--the emancipation of Cuban women.
Through lyric and associative meditations, Sainz anatomizes the unique
grief of immigrant daughters, as the poems' speaker discovers how family
can be a microcosm of the very violence that displaced them. What
emerges is a spiritual blueprint for disinheritance, radical
self-determination, and the nuanced examinations of myth, ritual, and
resistance.
