the island on my back

In poems and photographs, the island on my back paints a portrait of a Cuban immigrant family in Canada, the people and life they left behind, the ghosts that remain, and the island responding, becoming something other than their remembered homeland.

We wait for the sun to decide when everything ends. Las claves keep the rhythm. Here comes the rain.

With attention to personal and colonial histories, alive with rhythm and repetition, complex traditional forms and experimental hybrid modes, the island on my back excavates questions of nation, family, and migration. What is the psychic toll of displacement? Is it easier to leave than to be left? Threaded through the tapestry of the poet’s own life, a vibrant chorus of clear-eyed, dynamic speakers urgently argue, question, recall, invent, mythologize, tell themselves and each other stories of what it is to be Cuban, to be of a place, to imagine the land and listen to its pain, to be displaced, diasporic, grieving, arriving, leaving, returning, constantly explaining, carrying an island on their backs. The island responds, I feed my children the only way I know how: tell them to walk and keep walking until their feet run dry.

the island on my back spans a whole life, a family’s life, a nation plundered under the heat. What remains is what the poet carries, what the people carry, and the poems made under that weight.