The Painted Bunting's Last Molt by Virgil Suárez

Suárez’s new book is filled with poems of exile. The poems are so clear and well written that you long for a place you’ve never seen. I’m homesick for Cuba after this book. That’s good writing! There are recurrent themes in the book, leading a bit of obsession to the work, themes like migration by raft, water and rain, mothers and fathers and birds. The language is beautiful and accessible. The only distance between the reader and the poem is the distance the poet brings to the work, the distance of time. This book longs for home. Buy here.

From “My Mother’s Mouth Fills With Water”

. . . I think of the salesman / at the funeral home in Hialeah / where my mother died, and how / he proposed the extra rubber / seal for the casket, an added / expense, “you know how water / gets into everything in Florida,” he / said. And I think of my mother / drowning below the earth; how / fitting for an islander to return / to water, to return home whichever / way possible. Blessed water / that carries us deeper than we intend to go.

From “Lament for the Boy Rafter”

. . . He tells his father, his mother, his friends / not to wait up for him if one day he does not return. // They laugh at him, this skinny boy of nine, green / eyes, green spirit, and at night, in the waking of things lost, // he dreams of bouyancy, splintered pieces of wood, an inner tube, / black circles on the water, all line up from Santiago to Miami, // and he skips across one inner tube to another on his way North.