Background
Juan Carlos Flores was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1962.
( Alamar, the home of award-winning Cuban poet Juan Carlo...)
Alamar, the home of award-winning Cuban poet Juan Carlos Flores, is the setting for his collection, The Counterpunch and Other Horizontal Poems) / El contragolpe (y otros poemas horizontales). Constructed as a self-help community in eastern Havana, Alamar is the largest housing complex in the world. Flores’s highly structured texts, organized into “art galleries,” present prose paintings of a big place in very small form. Flores builds a poetic landscape with repeating structures that mirror Alamar’s five-floor walkups. Exploring life and dream on the flat surfaces of the poems, he gives fleeting glimpses of perception and survival at the urban margins. As the poet ages, so ages Alamar itself. Yet both find renewal through poetry. The eighty poems in this bilingual edition offer the first English translation of a complete Flores collection. It will also be of interest to Spanish-language readers seeking access to Cuban literature abroad. Award-winning scholar and translator Kristin Dykstra has compiled an introduction in which she presents Flores, his literary contexts, and references in his poems. Because Flores made specific requests regarding translation, fascinating notes also clarify and expound on choices Dykstra makes in the English version. A deluxe edition with a handmade, limited-edition color linocut print, including a letterpress-printed poem signed by the author, is available directly from the University of Alabama Press.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0817358137/?tag=2022091-20
Juan Carlos Flores was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1962.
Flores has a number of books published in Cuba including his award-winning Los Pájaros Escritos. In 1971, he moved to Alamar, a community built just to the east of Havana and considered one of the largest housing projects in the world. He originally lived in Zone 4, one of the first sections to be built, and later moved to Zone 6, where still resides today.
In 2012, he travelled outside of Cuba for the first time to speak to Brown University students about his book, El contragolpe.
Flores lives as an outsider in Cuba, holding no university degree or traditional job. As a writer, he is a well-known participant in the cosmopolitan literary culture of Havana.
He is also a pioneering figure in the experimental poetry and performance activities that emerged in recent decades in his community. He currently works with a poetry and visual arts collective group based out of Alamar.
In 1998, Flores founded Zona Franca, an alternative writer’s collective based in Alamar, with other artists.
Later, they merged with a visual arts group called Organising Medical Networked Information. Together they founded a progressive, collaborative project named Organising Medical Networked Information-Zona Franca. In 2009, Flores released a Digital Video Disc with 35 poems and a soundtrack by Tony Carreras. lieutenant is directed by Garage 19 and produced by Miriam Real Arcia.
( Alamar, the home of award-winning Cuban poet Juan Carlo...)