Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Randall. Here is the strength of poetry for the world. Is it possible this book exists? I cannot be the only one who realizes I have been waiting all my life to read Chely Lima! The poet driving their own body in the trunk through the vast vulnerable fields of becoming human the way they want to become human in an inflexible world. Many thanks to Margaret Randall for these beautiful translations of one of the most brilliant books in many years! Chely Lima is here! Everyone tell everyone! --CA Conrad These are poems of astonishing courage and compelling craft. Their language sizzles on the page. The poet's familiarity with history and his penchant for plumbing its most significant myths imbue these texts with a special richness. The myths come from the Greeks, Hindus, Germanic fairy tales, those drum beats brought to the New World by Africans during the ravages of the Middle Passage, and stories from indigenous America. Chely also creates some myths of his own. These poems are also gender- transgressive, revealing a personal journey as painful as it has been liberating. And it is a complicated journey. We cannot say the poet is only a man or that he was once a woman; such binary notions are themselves being challenged here. Body parts and the uses to which they are assigned in our inadequate society are routed from their comfort zones, made to look at themselves in a succession of mirrors and confronted head on. Chely refuses to play by society's hypocritical rules--in his life or work. --translator Margaret Randall, from the introduction.

Author Biography

Chely Lima is a transgender North American poet of Cuban origin. He writes prose, poetry, theater, journalism, scripts for film, radio and television; and is also a photographer. He has published numerous books in Cuba, Spain, the United States, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador--among them Lucrecia quiere decir perfidia (Ediciones Bagua, Madrid, 2015), Triangulos magicos (Editorial Planeta Mexicana, 1994; Eriginal Books, USA, 2014; and Ediciones Territoriales, Cuba, 2015), Discurso de la amante (Imagine Cloud Editions, 2013), and Confesiones nocturnas (Editorial Planeta, 1994), all of these novels. His books have been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Esperanto and Czechoslovakian. His monologues and works for the theater--for children as well as adults--have been performed in Cuba and Ecuador (he lived in the latter country from 1992 to 2001). A rock opera and a cantata were performed in Cuba's National Theater in the early 1990s.