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Looking Within / Mirar Adentro Selected Poems, 1954-2000 Bilingual Edition Nancy Morejón Edited and with an Introduction by Juanamaría Cordones-Cook

The African Cuban poet Nancy Morejón set out at a young age to explore the beauty and complexities of the life around and within her. Themes of social and political concern, loyalty, friendship and family, African identity, women's experiences, and hope for Cuba's future all found their way into her poems through bold metaphor and tender lyricism. This panoramic anthology, selected from ten volumes of Morejón's work and organized by theme, contains some poems that have already been acclaimed in several languages, others that are less known, and some never before published. Without intending to, she has revitalized contemporary Caribbean feminist literary discourse. One can find in her work the tensions between colonizer and colonized, dominator and dominated, and at the same time enjoy the sheer beauty of images depicting suffering, strength, and hope.

"Every student of literature and anyone else, anywhere in the world, who would claim to have any reading habits and some appreciation of poetry, must read Nancy Morejón. For your reading pleasure, your intellectual, emotional or spiritual enrichment, Nancy Morejón's poetry is as much a necessity as the food we need to nourish our bodies." — Keorapetse Kgositsile, University of California, Los Angeles Poet, essayist, critic, editor, journalist, and translator, Nancy Morejón directs the Caribbean Studies Center at Casa de las Américas, Havana. She has won two recent awards—the "Premio de la Critica," and the most coveted literary award in Cuba, "Premio Nacional de Literatura Cubana"

African American Life Series $42.95s cloth / ISBN 0-8143-3037-1 $26.95s paper / ISBN 0-8143-3038-X 320 pages / 6 x 9 2002 contents > introduction [partial] > extract >