A little body are many parts: Un cuerpecito son muchas partes

By Legna Rodríguez Iglesias

Legna Rodríguez Iglesias has quickly become one of the most celebrated Cuban poets writing today. Her intense – often confrontational – poetry refuses to conform, subverting expectations and challenging social mores. Particularly arresting is her uncomfortable focus on the human body, which she dramatises in isolation, stripping it of context, making it strange and even obscene. Alongside poems of extreme descriptive vigour, Rodríguez Iglesias irreverently skewers the hypocrisies, clichés and hierarchies of our time. This selection offers a broad survey of Rodríguez Iglesias’s work, drawing on eight previous collections in Spanish. Throughout, the poems are inflected with Cuban history and explore the tensions between the generation of the Revolution and her own. The consequences of poet’s long-term residence in Miami are forcefully brought home through poems of emigration and estrangement. The playfulness and verbal dexterity that marks Rodríguez Iglesias’s work in Spanish has been expertly brought to life in English by Abigail Parry, an award-winning poet whose debut collection Jinx was published by Bloodaxe in 2018, working in collaboration with bridge-translator and writer Serafina Vick.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Oct 24, 2019
• ISBN: 9781780374970

Legna Rodríguez Iglesias

Legna Rodríguez Iglesias was born in 1984 in Camagüey, Cuba and now lives in Miami, where until recently she worked at a pizza parlor. She has won a number of major Cuban prizes including the Premio Iberoamericana de Cuento Julio Cortázar, the Premio Calendario de Cuento, the Premio Calendario de Poesía, and the Premio Casa de las Américas de Teatro for her first play, marking the first time the prize has been awarded to a Cuban exile. She is also the winner most recently of the 2016 Paz Prize for her book of poetry MIAMI CENTURY FOX . She has published eleven books of poetry, three books of stories, two novels, and four children’s books. The vast majority have never left the island, where her rising star has been called El tsunami Legna.