90 Miles

Ninety miles separate Cuba and Key West, Florida. Crossing that distance, thousands of Cubans have lost their lives. For Cuban American poet Virgil Suárez, that expanse of ocean represents the state of exile, which he has imaginatively bridged in over two decades of compelling poetry.
“Whatever isn't voiced in time drowns,” Suárez writes in “River Fable,” and the urgency to articulate the complex yearnings of the displaced marks all the poems collected here. 90 Miles contains the best work from Suárez's six previous collections: You Come Singing, Garabato, In the Republic of Longing, Palm Crows, Banyan, and Guide to the Blue Tongue, as well as important new poems.
At once meditative, confessional, and political, Suárez's work displays the refracted nature of a life of exile spent in Cuba, Spain, and the United States. Connected through memory and desire, Caribbean palms wave over American junk mail. Cuban mangos rot on Miami hospital trays. William Shakespeare visits Havana. And the ones who left Cuba plant trees of reconciliation with the ones who stayed.
Courageously prolific, Virgil Suárez is one of the most important Latino writers of his generation.

More Praise

Virgil Suarez has emerged as a major voice in Cuban American literature, as this collection clearly demonstrates. Suarez is a poet of praise: for his working-class immigrant parents, for the music of Cuba, for the mangos of his beloved island. His range of reference is impressive; Li Po, Shakespeare, J. Edgar Hoover, and many others walk through the Habana of his poetic imagination. Virgil Suarez is a trustworthy guide in this world, and any other.

Martin Espada

Lorea sits down companionably on the sofa in grieving households; the poet's grandfather conjures lightning and collects it in jars in Havana - and the ninety miles of water that separate Cuba from the U.S. are traversed in a heartbeat.

Carol Muske-Dukes

Suarez is a poet of witness, and therefore, a moral compass for our times. . . . There is a lush oddnes of diction here that comes only from those who know the language second. . . . Most striking . . . is the poet's ability to sustain the moments of many of these poems easily over the course of sixty or more lines so that we become emotional participants, caught up in an urgent and necessary movement towards stunning inevitabilities that, in these dangerous days, we cannot do without.

Bruce Weigl

Suarez's voice is a heartbreaking combination of outrage and longing . . . '90 Miles', a selection of one poet's previous collections of poetry, is a rarity in the industry. That this poet is Latino is additional cause for celebration and sincere pride.

El Paso Times

His attention to detail is a delight, and his energetic voice, with the tint of his native tongue, is powerful and compelling. . . . Suarez is one of today's more important Latino voices, and this volume should be included in any serious contemporary poetry collection.

Library Journal

The music of the poems oscillates internally between the fluidity of a few Spanish words and the harsher syllables of English, offering a compelling sense of dislocation, true to the book's primary concerns.

ForeWord Magazine

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