Poet in the Neighborhood 
Rafael Alcides

In Poet in the Neighborhood, Rafael Alcides, one of Cuba’s most important poets, renders in verse the mood and rhythm of life from the 20th to 21st centuries—its everydayness punctured by exceptional moments of splendor, crisis, and oblivion.  Selected by Pablo Medina, an esteemed Cuban American poet and novelist in his own right, these poems unfold scenes of love, violation, hunger, boredom, corruption, and regret, set against the backdrop of villages and cities and framed by grand and mundane subjects. Through these vivid portrayals, Alcides offers profound insights into the interplay of individual thought and larger sociopolitical forces. In Pablo Medina’s masterful English translations, the original beauty and power of Alcides’s Cuban Spanish resonate with equal aesthetic depth.

—Jacqueline Loss, Co-editor, The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature