From sensual pleasures and perils, moments and memories of darkness and light, the poems in Orlando Ricardo Menes's new collection sew together stories of dislocation and loss, of survival and hope, of a world patched together by a family over five generations of diaspora. This is Menes's tapestry of the Americas. From Miami to Cuba, Panama to Bolivia and Peru, through the textures, sounds, colors, shapes, and scents of exile and emigration, we find refuge at last in a sense of wholeness and belonging residing in this intensely felt, finely crafted poetry.
Orlando Ricardo Menes is an associate professor of English and Faculty Fellow of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. His poetry collections include, among others, Furia: Poems and Rumba atop the Stones.