Deuda Natal finds the beauty within vulnerability and the dignity amidst precariousness. As one of the most prominent voices in Puerto Rican poetry, Mara Pastor uses the poems in this new bilingual collection to highlight the way that fundamental forms of caring for life—and for language—can create a space of poetic decolonization. The poems in Deuda Natal propose new ways of understanding as they traverse a thematic landscape of women’s labor, the figure of the nomad and immigrant, and the return from economic exile to confront the catastrophic confluence of disaster and disaster capitalism. The poems in Deuda Natal reckon with the stark environmental degradation in Puerto Rico and the larger impacts of global climate change as they navigate our changing world through a feminist lens. Pastor’s work asserts a feminist objection to our society’s obsession with production and the accumulation of wealth, offering readers an opportunity for collective vulnerability within these pages. For this remarkable work, Pastor has found unique allies in María José Giménez and Anna Rosenwong, the translators of Deuda Natal. Winner of the 2020 Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets, this collection showcases masterfully crafted and translated poems that are politically urgent and emotionally striking.

Winner of the 2023 Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets Aflame with desire, the eye conjures, dreams, invents itself, sees what it wants. The eye sees what it is able to see. Ojo en celo / Eye in Heat brings into sharp relief the limits of our gaze. It shows us what it is to escape the mirror and move beyond mirages. Margarita Pintado Burgos invites us to ponder the impasse while showing us ways to see better, to break the habit of lying, and to confront images along with language. With devastating clarity, Pintado Burgos’s poems, presented in both Spanish and English, give voice to the world within and beyond sight: the plants, the trees, the birds, the ocean waves, the fruit forgotten in the kitchen, the house’s furniture. Light takes on new dimensions to expose, manipulate, destroy, and nourish. Alejandra Quintana Arocho’s sensitive English translation renders the stark force of these poems without smoothing over the language of the original. This collection is for anyone who has felt the weight of beauty that remains hidden. It is for those who have left behind a mother, a father, a country. It is for those who know that there is no way out of the poem, for those who have had to live off a house of words and need that house to be as real as possible. Pintado Burgos writes as a woman, exile, daughter, sister, lover, and artist empowered by the restorative potential of the creative phenomenon.

"United States of Banana takes place at the Statue of Liberty in post-9/11 New York City, where Hamlet, Zarathustra, and Giannina are on a quest to free the Puerto Rican prisoner Segismundo. Segismundo has been imprisoned for more than one hundred years, hidden away by his father, the king of the United States of Banana, for the crime of having been born. But when the king remarries, he frees his son, and for the sake of reconciliation, makes Puerto Rico the fifty-first state and grants American passports to all Latin American citizens. This staggering show of benevolence rocks the global community, causing an unexpected power shift with far reaching implications."--P. [4] of cover.

Este volumen reúne diversas voces que ofrecen testimonios y rinden un homenaje al maestro, autor de libros capitales como los 1001 años de la lengua española y de importantes ediciones, antecedidas por las profundas y eruditas reflexiones de Alatorre sobre sus autores favoritos y sus géneros predilectos, como las Fiori di sonetti / Flores de sonetos, El brujo de Autlán y numerosísimos artículos.