Ño
Para los balseros
There is no country where the dead don't float.Men and children going,having gone, lungwetacross thickened water.Be it the body to knowwhat's missing. To callback the colors. At seathe stomach is a bugle,though I've heard itcalled a scream.Oil drums headlessas monarchs, styrofoamon the knees. Said ofregimes: under or over.Here or there.The orchids are lovelythis time of yearand the women, writing.What covers the landand is the land—much in us still.
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- March 12, 2024
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“Ño” from HAVE YOU BEEN LONG ENOUGH AT TABLE: by Leslie Sainz.
Published by Tin House on September 26, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Leslie Sainz.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Hillary Dubie
Leslie Sainz is the author of Have You Been Long Enough at Table (Tin House, 2023). The daughter of Cuban exiles, her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, the Yale Review, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. A three-time National Poetry Series finalist, she’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, CantoMundo, and the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts at Bucknell University. Originally from Miami, she lives in Vermont and works as the managing editor of New England Review.
"Sugar is a recurring motif in this debut collection by the daughter of Cuban exiles, whose poems address life after the revolution & especially the role of women."
—The New York Times Book Review
"Sainz creates assemblages of spiky surfaces and eye-catching asymmetries. . . . having her poetry both ways, alternating an idiosyncratic squint with an eye for geopolitical change and mercurial family dynamics."
—Poetry Foundation
"So many of Sainz’s lines carry the weight of a culture—poet as medium. . . . Ambitious. . . . A promising debut."
—The Millions, A Must Read Poetry Collection of Summer
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