The Floating IslandPaperback, 1 September 1999

Poetry. Written in English but infused with a sense of Spanish rhythms and history, THE FLOATING ISLAND is equally an echo of Whitman, Ginsberg and Walcott. The coffee has redeemed itself by now./ I am awake enough to see you walking/ down the street to your apartment/ exhausted like a sparrow/ after long work in the tenements. The eponymous floating island of Pablo Medina's provocative new collection of poems is partly the Cuba of the poet's childhood, partly childhood itself -- country where heart and spirit were strangers equally to loss and to irony . . . -- Carl Phillips. Medina's ARCHING INTO THE AFTERLIFE (1991, Bilingual Press) is also available from SPD.