"You will spend your entire life trying to find home. Some days you will seek belonging in the bodies of beautiful beings. Most days, like sea turtles that migrated from distant lands, you will carry your home on your back." This collection of poetry is inspired by the feeling of losing and finding home and of building belonging where tidal waves have knocked down shelter. Daydreaming in Spanglish is the rebuilding of that shelter. A coming home. An invitation. It tastes like home-cooked meals that keep your belly full, and sounds like siblings laughing under bed sheets long after bedtime has passed. These poems are hands pressed together filled with prayers, and the feeling of kneeling beneath your mother's skirt while her tears water the soil that you will rise from. Daydreaming in Spanglish is both memoir and reverie from one of today's most confessional poets. Each poem holds a story about family, identity, and the art of code-switching between first and second language. Much like the author, a Hispanic-American poet, these poems were born into Spanish and translated into English. These confessions written in verse are a tribute to dreamers, a montage of gratitude, and a letter to immigrant parents who gave up everything so that our dreams would not fear darkness, but demand daylight. Thus, our daydreaming becomes possible in light of their dreaming. Inspired by the feeling of Mami's hands tousling my curls, the taste of Papi's cafe con pan and Abuela's voice, Daydreaming in Spanglish is a love letter written to dreamers. As the daughter of immigrants, each sentence strung together says thank you in dual dialects: gracias por su sueño hecho mi realidad.

“Impressive . . . [Cristina García’s] story is about three generations of Cuban women and their separate responses to the revolution. Her special feat is to tell it in a style as warm and gentle as the ‘sustaining aromas of vanilla and almond,’ as rhythmic as the music of Beny Moré.”—Time Cristina García’s acclaimed book is the haunting, bittersweet story of a family experiencing a country’s revolution and the revelations that follow. The lives of Celia del Pino and her husband, daughters, and grandchildren mirror the magical realism of Cuba itself, a landscape of beauty and poverty, idealism and corruption. Dreaming in Cuban is “a work that possesses both the intimacy of a Chekov story and the hallucinatory magic of a novel by Gabriel García Márquez” (The New York Times). In celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the novel’s original publication, this edition features a new introduction by the author. Praise for Dreaming in Cuban “Remarkable . . . an intricate weaving of dramatic events with the supernatural and the cosmic . . . evocative and lush.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Captures the pain, the distance, the frustrations and the dreams of these family dramas with a vivid, poetic prose.”—The Washington Post “Brilliant . . . With tremendous skill, passion and humor, García just may have written the definitive story of Cuban exiles and some of those they left behind.”—The Denver Post

This work traces the etymologies of the entries to their earliest sources, shows their kinship to both Spanish and English, and organizes them into families of words in an Appendix of Indo-European roots. Entries are based on those of the Diccionario de la lengua española de la Real Academia Española.

Collection of personal lyrical thoughts that the author started in March of 2003. Poetic images aiming to Haiku, observations from a poet with an honest brooding approach and at times... a keen vision of life's situations, human behavior and a bit of philosophy providing relief to the writer, whenever he sat daydreaming, in front of a blank piece of paper.