Description
Omar Perez
With an Afterword by the translator, Kristin Dykstra
Literary Nonfiction. Translated with an Afterword by Kristin Dykstra. In 2002, while temporarily living in Europe (mostly Amsterdam), the poet Omar Pérez began writing in a notebook. His journey began as a short professional visit that shifted into something less defined after he fell in love. Eventually the notebook became CUBANOLOGY, a book of days reflecting on three years of life at a remove from the island: “A memory of a flight, a journey, jour.” Along with registering common and uncommon vicissitudes of everyday life, the result presents a fusion of languages. Simultaneously national and polycultural, CUBANOLOGY streams poetic thought and experience, excerpts from other writings in progress, and the coalescence of a new islandic consciousness—scenes reminiscent of many-minded Odysseus, if home were heart. Visual material appearing throughout CUBANOLOGY blends Pérez’s sketches with photographs from that period, as well as art he made after returning to his family home on Havana’s iconic Malécon.
