You contain the windYou stir all the strange meanings of wordsand paintingsI’m not wired to understandI feel and that hurtsMoored boats emerge under my legsI watch how a kleptomaniac touches humid goldhe numbs me wearing cold silk glovesA game of strange hands and legsWhile he steals between the two of us I taste youYou contain light and red wineI sweat in a winter of fireI switch to another man another and another who plays with my skirtsIt’s the wind the wind transparency and scentwhite letters dispersed in desire’s amorality.
Orgy of the Wind
Wendy Guerra
Translated from the Spanish
Feature Date
- May 14, 2023
Series
- Translation
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“Orgy of the Wind” from DELICATES: by Wendy Guerra.
Published by Seagull Books in April 2023.
English Copyright © 2023 by Nancy Naomi Carlson and Esperanza Hope Snyder.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Wendy Guerra is a critically acclaimed Cuban poet and novelist. Author of three collections of poetry, her works have been translated into thirteen languages. Todos se van (Everyone’s Leaving), a novel, was adapted into a screenplay. Guerra’s Ropa Interior was published in Spain, perhaps too sensual and steamy for Cuba. Indeed, Guerra, who quotes Anais Nїn in an epigraph at the start of this poetry collection and has translated her work, has been described as “a sort of descendant of Nin.”
Nancy Naomi Carlson is a translator, poet and essayist who won the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize for translating Khal Torabully’s Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude (Seagull, 2021). Author of twelve titles (eight translated), her second poetry collection, An Infusion of Violets (Seagull, 2019), was named “New & Noteworthy” by The New York Times. A recipient of two translation grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and decorated by the French government with the Academic Palms, Carlson is the Translations Editor for On the Seawall.
Esperanza Hope Snyder’s poems and translations have appeared in Blackbird, The Gettysburg Review, The Kenyon Review, International Poetry Review, Free State Review, Poetry Northwest, The Southern Review, and other journals. She’s recipient of poetry fellowships at the Gettysburg Review and the Kenyon Review. Honors include the Donald Everitt Axinn Award in Poetry for Bread Loaf. Assistant Director of Bread Loaf in Sicily, co-coordinator of the Lorca Prize, Esperanza is the author of the poetry collection, Esperanza and Hope (Sheep Meadow Press) and two plays, Lullaby for George and The Back Room.
Poems from a critically acclaimed Cuban writer available in English for the first time.
Imbued with a sensuality reminiscent of the work of Anaïs Nin, Wendy Guerra’s Delicates takes readers on an exhilarating journey through the cities of love, where women leave their bodies ‘in the showers of men’, marking their territory ‘like animals in heat’, their panties ‘saturated with sand and a sidereal isolating odor’. Guerra’s shocking metaphors and images invite us to enter her gallery of striking and provoking poems where we witness a flight through the air from a thirty-fourth-story window and a woman’s pilgrimage to the salt flats ‘to taste the pink in stones’ on her lover’s behalf. Guerra’s relationship with her native Cuba—much like her relationships with men—is complex and multilayered. Her work confronts the realities of a political system that doesn’t celebrate artistic freedom. Here we have a new way of looking at a woman, an artist, a country, and the colonizers of that country. In these music-infused poems, Guerra shares with us her hard-won truths.
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