"We Carry Our Homes with Us: A Cuban American Memoir" by Marisella Veiga

 
On December 30, 1960, Marisella Veiga with her mother and two brothers boarded a plane from Havana to Miami. Her father fled a few months later, joining his family with a total of fourteen U.S. cents in his pocket and an understanding that he would never see his homeland again. Seeking a less competitive job market and thanks largely to the sponsorship of a host family in St. Paul, the Veigas resettled in Minnesota, miles away from the Caribbean subtropics, where the climate was similar to home, Spanish was spoken, and thousands of exiles arrived each month.

Veiga’s stories are rich with detail and character as she describes her integration into a northern midwestern landscape she grew to love, from adapting to the cold—learning to ice-skate before learning to speak English—to her obsession with Davy Jones. Yet, the weight of her biculturalism—being of two worlds but an outsider to both—has been central to her quest for identity: “Sometimes, I dream that if I can get in touch with the essence of that monolingual child with one set of customs, I would be satisfied. I would be complete, whole.” In this honest memoir, readers will find a resonant story of an exile’s journey, one that ultimately embraces those two worlds: a life of conflict and limbo but also one of richness and understanding.

Advance Praise:

“Marisella Veiga’s touching memoir delicately plumbs the dislocation, both physical and existential, that framed the journey of so many Cubans who were forced to flee their tropical island. Her family depended on grit and courage to survive, and later thrive, in their adopted Minnesota, even if that meant stifling all their yearning for and fading memories of Cuba. Looking back, Veiga courageously gives voice to how her life was shaken by this rupture from her homeland until, as she writes, she learned to carry her home with her.” 
~ Lizette Alvarez, Pulitzer and Polk award-winning New York Times national correspondent

“Marisella Veiga has created a memorable and timely account of her family’s flight from Cuba, her childhood years in Minnesota, and the reverberating effects of life in exile, all the while revealing how people and families hold themselves together and help each other along.”
 ~ Nick Healy, author of It Takes You Over

About the Author:

Marisella Veiga is a writer, poet, journalist, and adjunct instructor at Flagler College. Born in Havana, Cuba, and raised in St. Paul and Miami, she lives and writes in St. Augustine, Florida.

Published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press
Available April 15, 2016
$16.95 paper, 192 pages, 10 B&W Photos, 5.5 x 8.5 inches, ISBN: 9781681340067
$9.99 e-book, ISBN: 9781681340074

"One Today" by Richard Blanco

"One Today"

One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores,
peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces
of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth
across the Great Plains, then charging across the Rockies.
One light, waking up rooftops, under each one, a story
told by our silent gestures moving behind windows.

My face, your face, millions of faces in morning’s mirrors,
each one yawning to life, crescendoing into our day:
pencil-yellow school buses, the rhythm of traffic lights,
fruit stands: apples, limes, and oranges arrayed like rainbows
begging our praise. Silver trucks heavy with oil or paper -- bricks or milk, teeming over highways alongside us,
on our way to clean tables, read ledgers, or save lives -- to teach geometry, or ring up groceries as my mother did
for twenty years, so I could write this poem.

All of us as vital as the one light we move through,
the same light on blackboards with lessons for the day:
equations to solve, history to question, or atoms imagined,
the “I have a dream” we keep dreaming,
or the impossible vocabulary of sorrow that won’t explain
the empty desks of twenty children marked absent
today, and forever. Many prayers, but one light
breathing color into stained glass windows,
life into the faces of bronze statues, warmth
onto the steps of our museums and park benches 
as mothers watch children slide into the day.

One ground. Our ground, rooting us to every stalk
of corn, every head of wheat sown by sweat
and hands, hands gleaning coal or planting windmills
in deserts and hilltops that keep us warm, hands
digging trenches, routing pipes and cables, hands
as worn as my father’s cutting sugarcane
so my brother and I could have books and shoes.

The dust of farms and deserts, cities and plains
mingled by one wind -- our breath. Breathe. Hear it
through the day’s gorgeous din of honking cabs,
buses launching down avenues, the symphony
of footsteps, guitars, and screeching subways,
the unexpected song bird on your clothes line.

Hear: squeaky playground swings, trains whistling,
or whispers across cafe tables, Hear: the doors we open
for each other all day, saying: hello, shalom,
buon giorno, howdy, namaste, or buenos días
in the language my mother taught me -- in every language
spoken into one wind carrying our lives
without prejudice, as these words break from my lips.

One sky: since the Appalachians and Sierras claimed
their majesty, and the Mississippi and Colorado worked
their way to the sea. Thank the work of our hands:
weaving steel into bridges, finishing one more report
for the boss on time, stitching another wound 
or uniform, the first brush stroke on a portrait,
or the last floor on the Freedom Tower
jutting into a sky that yields to our resilience.

One sky, toward which we sometimes lift our eyes
tired from work: some days guessing at the weather
of our lives, some days giving thanks for a love
that loves you back, sometimes praising a mother
who knew how to give, or forgiving a father
who couldn’t give what you wanted.

We head home: through the gloss of rain or weight
of snow, or the plum blush of dusk, but always -- home,
always under one sky, our sky. And always one moon
like a silent drum tapping on every rooftop
and every window, of one country -- all of us --
facing the stars
hope -- a new constellation
waiting for us to map it,
waiting for us to name it -- together


Source: http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-inauguration-2013-richard-blanco-poem-20130121,0,5626688.story

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We are petitioning President Barack Obama to exonerate the Right Honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey. http://signon.org/sign/exonerate-marcus-garvey?source=c.url&r_by=4631897

Carolina Hospital, Adrian Castro and Geoffrey Philp @ USpeak

GET READY FOR OLD SCHOOL MIAMI!

The University of Miami’s USpeak Open Verse and Short Story Performance Series begins a brand­new year with Old School Miami Poets, featuring Carolina Hospital, Adrian Castro and Geoffrey Philp, on Thursday, September 6^th, 8PM at the Oasis Deli at the Whitten University Center.

Carolina Hospital is a poet, essayist and novelist at Miami Dade College. To date, she has published five books, including the novel A Little Love (under the pen name C. C. Medina), and the seminal history work A Century of Cuban Writers in Florida. She participated with thirteen South Florida authors, including Carl Hiaasan, James Hall, Dave Barry and Edna Buchanan, in the New York Times’ best­selling novel Naked Came the Manatee.

Adrian Castro is a Miami­born poet, performer and interdisciplinary artist, whose Caribbean heritage has provided fertile ground for his rhythmic, distinctive Afro­Caribbean style. He is the author of Cantos to Blood & Honey (Coffee House Press), Wise Fish (Coffee House Press, 2005), and Handling Destiny (Coffee House Press 2009), and has been published in several literary anthologies.

Geoffrey Philp, author of the e­book Bob Marley and Bradford’s iPod, has also written two short story collections, several volumes of poetry, and two children's books. A multi­award winning writer, Philp’s work has the distinction of being published in both the Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories and the Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse.

In addition to our featured artists, USpeak spotlights audience members who share a page of their writing during USpeak’s Open Mic segments. Sign up begins at 7:30 when doors open.

USpeak events are free and open to the public, and are sponsored in part by the University of Miami's Creative Writing Program, Multicultural Student Affairs and the American Studies Program.

For more information, please visit http://www.miami.edu/uspeak, where you can also link to podcasts of previous USpeaks, prepared by our sound engineer, the author/musician/talk show host Matt Gajewski.

For further information, please contact: University of Miami Creative Writing Director, M. Evelina Galang at mgalang@miami.edu, or Patrick Sung at patrick.k.sung@gmail.com. 

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Blog Disclosure Policy

Geoffrey Philp’s Blog Spot receives a percentage of the purchase price on anything you buy through links to Amazon, Shambala Books, Hay House, or any of the Google ads or Google Custom Search.


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An Evening with Ricardo Pau-Llosa.

La Otra Esquina de las Palabras (The Other Corner Where Words Gather) invites you to our literary circle for the month of October:

An Evening with Cuban-American Poet and Art Critic Ricardo Pau-Llosa.

A reading and discussion of the impact of visual arts on his work, among other themes explored in his new book in progress.


Ricardo Pau-Llosa  is a Cuban-American poet and art critic whose English-language poetry has appeared in six published collections—the last four from Carnegie Mellon University Press. Among his poetry titles are: Parable Hunter, The Mastery Impulse, Vereda Tropical, Cuba, and Bread of the Imagined. His work draws on many different ideas and themes—from the visual arts to Phenomenology, from theories on the workings of tropes to Cuban history, from everyday objects to episodes from ancient literature and the bible. His poems have appeared in many literary magazines—among them Agni, American Poetry Review, Ambit, Denver Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, PN Review, Salmagundi, Southern Review, TriQuarterly, and Virginia Quarterly Review, and in over a dozen major anthologies. He also has an extensive bibliography in the field of modern and contemporary art, especially Latin American. Pau-Llosa has been the subject of major features in Art Districts, BCV Cultural (Venezuela), El Nuevo Herald, Herencia Cultural Cubana, Manoa, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (PBS), Saw Palm, The Writer’s Chronicle, among many other publication. Last fall, the Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame exhibited Parallel Currents: Highlights of the Ricardo Pau-Llosa Collection of Latin American Art, a major show with an accompanying book-length catalogue which explored how poetry, art, and philosophy have shaped the mind and life of this accomplished writer and thinker.

On Friday, October 14th, Pau-Llosa will read poems that juxtapose events from the life of a secular man of our times with biblical scenes, fables inspired on the Seven Deadly Sins, sonnets based on paintings, among other works from his new book in progress.

Café Demetrio

300 Alhambra Circle, Coral Gables

305-448-4949

Friday, October 14th at 7:30 pm

21 Days/21 Poems: A Commonplace Object

Crumpled Paper

It sounds like what the heel knows

of landscape, the fiery chewing

of autumn's dry and unspared remnants.
That a season should leave itself
exposed so, and I walk it
into a fine grind, a radio's static errancy.

Are we not the world's antenna
always refining the received?
Would that we had ears
to seize glass molecules turning
the melt of it into seeming solid,
or ice forming in trays or weather.
That we could hear the seal
of scab on tissue or the snake's
interlocking scales upon the ground
it elegantly deafens in its stalk.

Because the ear fails, the hand pursues
in the leather of the now
opened sheet a landscape like the moon's
or a still shot of the ocean's faceted maze.
Mirror upon mirror closing like petals
or atoms, a fist of refractions
laid out in wave within wave, crack
within a crack of the paper I crumple
up again and listen to.

"Crumpled Paper" by Ricardo Pau-Llosa. The Mastery Impulse. Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2003.


Ricardo Pau-Llosa is always pushing himself to conjure associations while observing everyday objects, and to use the details to create poems. The poems arise from an attention to the intricacies of the object and influenced by Husserlian Phenomenology, Pau-Llosa contemplates their effect on his consciousness. In "Crumpled Paper," like many of the other poems in The Mastery Impulse Pau-Llosa lifts the object from the quotidian into metaphor.


And the music!: "a fist of refractions/ laid out in wave within wave, crack/ within a crack of paper I crumple."

About Ricardo Pau-LLosa

Ricardo Pau-Llosa  is a Cuban-American poet, pioneer art critic of Latin American art in the US and Europe, and author of short fiction. Pau-Llosa was born into a working-class family in Havana. In 1960 Pau-Llosa fled Cuba with his parents, older sister, and maternal grandmother — all of whom emerge in his autobiographical poems of exile and remembrance. He graduated from Belén Jesuit Preparatory High School in Miami in 1971, and went on to major in English (literature) at various universities, among them Florida International University (BA, 1974), Florida Atlantic University (MA, 1976), and the University of Florida (1978–1981). Divorced with no children, Pau-Llosa is also an avid collector of modern, folk, and tribal art from the Americas. He lives in Miami.

Source: Wikipedia

 21 Days/21 Poems: A Commonplace Object

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