Beneath the Spanish

Poetry by Victor Hernández Cruz October 10, 2017 • 6 x 9 • 185 pages • 978-1-56689-489-0 Puerto Rico, California, New York, Morocco—these are songs of a poet’s genesis, and the places that formed him. Beneath the Spanish is history, the clash and melt of cultures, the conquest of the New World, colonialism, bilingualism, fragmentation, and cubism. Poems built of tobacco, sugar, café; Spanish, Arabic, English; José Martí, Federico García Lorca, and William Carlos Williams. A history and exploration of Hernández Cruz’s Caribbean roots as well as a documentation of and counterpoint to the origin of the European cultural intrusion into the New World, Beneath the Spanish deconstructs and reconstructs a wounded history, offering a prayer for communication between distances, oceans, music, dance, and mountains, revealing the past in the present moment we live. About the Author Victor Hernández Cruz is the author of several collections of poetry including, most recently, The Mountain in the Se