Virgil SuárezIn The House of White Light When my grandmother left the house who spent so much time in the sugar of the clapboard house he built to eat beans he cooked right in the can. including family, country, land, sometimes only stirred awake by the restlessness storm, my grandfather stripped naked the house saying "que me parta un rayo," with his arms out, the hard rain pelted about him, and he danced and cradled kept falling, these flashes of white light, an armful of large mason jars my grandmother with fractal light. Like babies, he carried and the house filled with the immense including the memories of how each nail in the well, the loss of this country, that in this perpetual waking, the world of electricity, those moments zapped act of snatching lightning out of heavy air,
|
National Endowment for the Arts · an independent federal agency
1100 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20506
Virgil Suárez is the only son of a pattern-cutter and piecemeal seamstress working the sweatshops and factories in the United States. He was born in Havana, Cuba in 1962 and raised in the US since 1974. Suarez holds an MFA in Creative Writing (1987) from Louisiana State University and is currently full professor of creative writing at Florida State University in Tallahassee. Suarez is the author of several novels, including Latin Jazz (William Morrow/Simon & Schuster), The Cutter (Ballantine), Havana Thursdays and Going Under (Arte Publico Press; a collection of short fiction, Welcome to the Oasis (Arte Publico Press); three new poetry collections in the last two years, You Come Singing (Tia Chucha Press/Northwestern University), Garabato Poems (Wings Press), and In the Republic of Longing (Arizona State University/Bilingual Review Press); as well as most recently a selection of prose and poetry titled Spared Angola: Memories of a Cuban-American Childhood. His poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, Colorado Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Tampa Review; his book reviews appear regularly in The Los Angeles Times and The Miami Herald, among others; and he has edited several best-selling anthologies of Latino/a literature, including Iguana Dreams: New Latino Fiction (Harper Collins), Paper Dance: 55 Latino Poets (Persea Books), and Little Havana Blues (Arte Publico Press). He lives with his wife and daughters in Florida, dividing his time between Tallahassee and Miami.
|