Set against the cultural and political backdrop of interwar Europe and the Americas, Poetry in Pieces is the first major study of the Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo (1892-1938) to appear in English in more than thirty years. Vallejo lived and wrote in two distinct settings---Peru and Paris---which were continually crisscrossed by new developments in aesthetics, politics, and practices of everyday life. Michelle Clayton combines close readings of Vallejo's writings with cultural, historical, and theoretical analysis, connecting Vallejo---and Latin American poetry---to the broader panorama of international modernism and the avant-garde, and to writers and artists such as Rainer Maria Rilke, James Joyce, Georges Bataille, and Charlie Chaplin. Poetry in Pieces sheds new light on one of the key figures in twentieth-century Latin American literature, while exploring ways of rethinking the parameters of international lyric modernity.

"This book provides a critical assessment of José Martí, relying primarily on his own writings. While Martí is influential in the construction of Cuban socio-philosophical thought, De La Torre explores how he still remains complicit with white Cuban/Spaniard supremacy and how that contributes to the construction of intra-Cuban oppression today"--

The presence of youngsters on the streets of Caracas embodies social contradictions at the national level, and this book discusses how these contradictions are played out in an oil-producing nation afflicted with hyperinflation generalized corruption, the deterioration of public services, increasing poverty, and violence. Vivid life stories told by street children themselves portray their relations with family and friends, as well as with people they encounter: police officers, journalists, social workers, and passersby at their local hangouts. The book also describes and analyzes the justice system and institutions for minors, illustrating the constant failures to respond to, contain, or lessen youth violence.

One of the most paradoxical aspects of Cuban history is the coexistence of national myths of racial harmony with lived experiences of racial inequality. Here a historian addresses this issue by examining the ways soldiers and politicians coded their discussions of race in ideas of masculinity during Cuba’s transition from colony to republic. Cuban insurgents, the author shows, rarely mentioned race outright. Instead, they often expressed their attitudes toward racial hierarchy through distinctly gendered language—revolutionary masculinity. By examining the relationship between historical experiences of race and discourses of masculinity, Lucero advances understandings about how racial exclusion functioned in a supposedly raceless society. Revolutionary masculinity, she shows, outwardly reinforced the centrality of color blindness to Cuban ideals of manhood at the same time as it perpetuated exclusion of Cubans of African descent from positions of authority.

Love poems in Spanish and English of various topics, From Love, Death, Countries, Foreign Affairs, Politics. Written from 2009-2019