Palm Crows

Hibiscus, banyan trees, and royal palms. Mango jam, white slices of sugarcane, and oxtail stew. Childhood games with fireflies and snail shells. These are images of a Cuba that many remember and others have never known, captured here in the powerful poems of Virgil Suarez. Born in Havana in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, Suarez is now one of more than a million Cubans living in the United States. In Palm Crows Suarez offers a compelling cancion of loss, longing, and memory as he explores the meaning of exile. In poems that range from playful and fantastic to elegiac and meditative, he writes about the in-betweenness of spirit of those who have left their home and must try to forge a new one in the United States. Invoking water, song, earth, and darkness, he seeks to create his place in the world a place for his family and his spirit to call home. He constructs a slippery camouflage of animals: fish-beings, turtles, chupacabras, birds. As Suarez’s poem-stories drift from one form and species to another, these creatures reincarnate and retell their lives to each other and to us. Like the crows of Hialeah, Virgil Suarez sings of exile, of absence, of captured cities, lost love, and claimed lives. Palm Crows shows us an almost mythical Cuba, offering a compelling testament both to the immigrant experience and to our own search for home.