Lorenzo García Vega (1926-2012) was one of Cuban writing’s salient voices, a voice that reached beyond Cuba to become the voice of exiles everywhere who never fully adapt to their new homes. Despite spending a large part of his life in the United States, Lorenzo never mastered spoken English, apart from the absolute minimum nec-essary for survival. But he could read it well, and he would have been thrilled by Christopher Winks’ brilliant selections and deft translations of  his diverse and sometimes difficult work. With unstinting care and grace, Winks has managed to convey in English Lorenzo’s idiosyncratic Cuban Spanish, giving us the extraordinary work of this marginal, solitary Cuban, in translations immersed in the variable and various unity, at once complex and precise, digressive and direct, of an essential figure in the literature of the Spanish language. —José Kozer, recipient of the Premio Iberoamericano de Poesía Pablo Neruda