The New York City launching of Anima vagula (Editorial Verbum), by Lourdes Gil, considered one of the best Cuban poets of her generation.The presentation will include projected images by the outstanding Iranian artist Iman Maleki, as well as visual depictions of several historical and literary figures pertinent to the book.
Praised for the breadth of its existential introspection and its lyricism, Gil’s new collection of poems has been brilliantly encapsulated by critic Andrea O’Reilly:
“In language both fluid and incandescent, Lourdes Gil plumbs the tenuous relationship between love and death, and evokes at once the pain and the beauty that can emerge amid the ruins of history, memory, and displacement. In a tragic litany, Gil joins a chorus of literary voices, past and present, and invokes the shadows of a long line of personages—both actual and mythic—whose iconic lives and sometimes ill-fated destinies testify to the violences and indignities that come as a result of unfettered power, and the utter vulnerability of individuals confronting forces beyond their control.
Figures such as Federico García Lorca and Benazir Bhutto act as signifiers for the nameless who have been silently swept up in the dark currents of history, and crushed in the struggle for power and gain. Yet their lives also testify to the unfathomable ability of the human heart to rise above the ashes and find beauty amid destruction and isolation. It is this terrible, insurmountable beauty that lifts the spirit and sustains it.”
Lourdes Gil is a poet and essayist. Her poetry collections include El cerco de las transfiguraciones, Empieza la ciudad, Blanca aldaba preludia, Vencido el fuego de la especie and Neumas. Additionally, her poems have
been anthologized in Burnt Sugar: A Cuban Anthology, edited by Oscar Hijuelos; Poetas cubanos del siglo XX, Editorial Hiperión, Madrid; La Cervantiada, edited by Julio Ortega in El Colegio de México, among many others, and her essays on the art and literature of the Cuban diaspora have been included in several books, journals and encyclopedias.
Ms. Gil has been the recipient of writing fellowships from The Ford Foundation, The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, The Poetry Society of America and the Oscar Cintas Foundation, and has held writer’s residency fellowships at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Casa de Andrés Bello in Caracas, Venezuela, and the US-Japan Foundation. She presently teaches Latin American history and culture, women’s studies and literature in translation at Baruch College, CUNY.
The book witll be presented by the distinguished literary scholar and critic Ana María Hernández, who will also moderate a conversatorio between the author and the audience. The entire presentation will be held in Spanish.
BARUCH COLLEGE
25th Street, bet. Lexington and Third Aves., NYC
6th FLOOR: CONFERENCE ROOM 6-210
SPACE IS LIMITED
Free Admission
All who wish to attend must RSVP at: cccofny@aol.com
Presented in collaboration with the Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature at Baruch College
With the promotional cooperation of
