Posts featuring David Cruz

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest in literary news from Guatemala, Costa Rica, and the Vietnamese diaspora!

This week in world literature, we hear from our Editors-at-Large reporting on the latest in literary developments! In Guatemala, we’re covering the literary community’s response to threats to the electoral process, as well as the country’s most recent award-winning authors. From the Vietnamese diaspora, we take a dive into two authors’ recent publications. Read on to learn more!

Rubén López, Editor-at-Large, Reporting on Guatemala

On August 31, sixty-two Guatemalan writers, editors, and artists signed a statement calling for the resignation of María Consuelo Porras, Head of the Public Prosecutor’s Office. Ms. Porras, who was included in the Engels List of 2023 for obstructing investigations against corrupt political allies, has been the main actor in the attempt to sabotage the Guatemalan electoral process of this year. 

On June 25, the progressive presidential ticket composed of Bernardo Arévalo and Karin Herrera surprisingly made it to the second round of the election. This started a series of legalistic arbitrariness from Ms. Porras in an effort to prevent the duly elected candidates from taking office democratically on January 14. 

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Resurrection: An Interview with David Cruz, 2021’s Winner of the Manuel Acuña Poetry Prize and Author of Lazarus

I like to think that all the ghosts from everything I’ve read since I was a kid have sat next to me whenever I sit down to write.

Silvia Plath once wrote, “I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it—”

This is the opening line of Lady Lazarus, a poem originally included in Plath’s second book, Ariel, published in 1965. Plath, the Bible’s Saint Lazarus, Ovid, David Bowie, Wisława Szymborska, Federico García Lorca, and others sat next to Costa Rican poet David Cruz, or so he claims, as he was writing—and “rigorously editing”—his latest book of poems, Lazarus. This is David’s third book of poems and a follow-up to his 2017 She likes to cry while listening to The Beatles (Valparaíso Ediciones). Earlier this year, Lazarus won the Manuel Acuña Poetry Prize (PIMAPLE in Spanish); previous winners include Antonio Gamoneda, Juan Malibran, and Isabel Conejo.

Lazarus is a retelling of the myth of Saint Lazarus and Plath’s Lady Lazarus. It’s also, says David, “a game of dualities”: past and present, life and death; and an homage to “voices from the past.”

David Cruz is one of Central America’s most exciting poets working today. His poetry is a force of nature. Stunning, picturesque, exquisite. Devastating, earth-shattering, dense. Divine, esoteric, spiritual, mythological, and personal, too. In 2015, more than two hundred critics from universities such as Harvard, Oxford, Columbia, and Princeton chose forty Spanish-speaking poets, born between 1970 and 1985, who, they believed, were “the most relevant” at that moment. They called them El canon abierto—The open canon. The list includes authors such as Andrés Neuman, Urayoán Noel, Raquel Lanseros, and David Cruz. The few glimpses we’ve seen of Lazarus in Vislumbre and available here (PIMAPLE asked David not to share the book just yet) are a testament of such power and “relevance.”

Lazarus I

The mind is a multidimensional map.
Everything we see is but the tip of the iceberg.
I go to the basement of my head
and find many lives,
many memories that I have not lived.
Now I understand Vallejo
“I will die in Paris with the downpour,
on a day I already remember.”

David has published three books of poetry, and in 2011, he won the prestigious Luis Cardoza y Aragón Poetry Prize for his collection Trasatlántico. He’s currently completing a Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle.

José Garcia Escobar (JGE): The last book you put out before Lazarus was She likes to cry while listening to The Beatles in 2017—originally in Spanish, in 2013. What type of literary concerns (or, to put it differently, what “ideas to write about”) did you have then, and what happened to them?

David Cruz (DC): My last book was a personal interpretation of the social, cultural, and technological shifts we experienced between the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century. My poetic self in that book gazed at a girl, and I gazed at the world through her. It’s a book nourished by many things such as music (The Beatles, naturally, is the book’s motif), daily news, artists’ ego, politics; I wanted to abridge many ideas under a clear and organic structure. And these are ideas that are still in my head, that remain, and they come to life every time someone reads the book.

TRACK 1

Music is a cavern of sounds
that resists oblivion.
Notes stretched out in bars.
Shallow vaults where the ships run aground.
Clouds in the depths of the universe
that at the point of impact with the rocks, plagiarize
their own interpretation.  READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

This week, we bring to you literary news from Palestine, India, and Central America!

Want to find out what’s happening in the literary world? This week, our Editors-at-Large bring you news from Palestine, where a landmark issue of World Literature Today features nearly two dozen of the most eminent Palestinian writers; India, where lockdown is slowly being lifted, and bookstores begin to bustle; and Central America, where writers from Guatemala to Costa Rica are releasing new books. Curious about this wide-ranging itinerary? Read on to find out more! 

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine

“While most writers offer their writing to the masses, Palestinian writers offer their very souls,” writes the Guest Editor Yousef Khanfar in his introduction to “Palestine Voices,” the Summer 2021 issue of World Literature Today (released earlier this month). Throughout its ninety-five-year publishing history, World Literature Today  (published at Oklahoma University), has never devoted a cover feature—let alone a dossier—exclusively to the literature, art, and culture of Palestine. Even when WLT dedicated an issue in 1986 to “Literatures of the Middle East: A Fertile Crescent,” Palestinian writers were conspicuously absent from the lineup, reveals Editor Daniel Simon. Indeed, in Mona Mikhail’s essay introducing the 1986 issue, one of the most pivotal events during the modern era of the Middle East—the Palestinian Nakba that led to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948—isn’t even mentioned.

With less attachment to the Nakba but more freedom for exploration and imagination, the expanded issue, at 128 pages, “represents a long-overdue—and especially timely—attempt to remedy this deficit” writes Simon. “As with other recent dossiers dedicated to so-called “stateless” literatures, WLT’s Summer 2021 issue recognizes an autonomous literary tradition that dates back centuries and now, in the diaspora, is one of the most cosmopolitan literatures in the world.” The voices gathered in “Palestine Voices,” according to Khanfar, “speak a universal language: one of life filled with human dignity that celebrates a rich cultural heritage and vibrant present along with aspirations for freedom, justice, and hope for a better future.”

Nearly two dozen of the most eminent Palestinian writers and poets are gathered in WLT’s Summer 2021 issue, along with the work of twenty renowned artists and photographers. Since a number of the pieces are web exclusive, it is all worth it to explore the issue online, and to appreciate the well-chosen art works that compliment the texts. As “colonization slowly dehumanizes Palestine and the Palestinians,” according to Khanfar, Simon believes that the work by the writers featured in this WLT issue “rehumanizes a people who have much to offer the world.” At any rate, trust them when they say “these voices are designed to captivate and not to convince.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

Our weekly roundup of literary news brings us to Central America, Albania, and Hong Kong.

We are a week out from the launch of our Summer 2018 issue of Asymptote and we could not be happier about the reading we have enjoyed and the positive response we have received from readers. As we get ready for the weekend, we bring you the latest news from around the world. José García Escobar reports from Central America, Barbara Halla from Albania, and Jacqueline Leung from Hong Kong. Happy reading!

José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Central America:

Guatemala has just closed its annual book fair, the Feria del Libro de Guatemala (Filgua), which hosted some of the most important publications and announcements of the year.

First, it was announced on Thursday, July 19 that the latest winner of the prestigious Premio Luis Cardoza y Aragón (Luis Cardoza and Aragón Prize) for Mesoamerican poetry was the Mexican writer, René Morales Hernández, with his book, Luz silenciosa descendiendo de las colinas de Chiapas. Born in Chiapas, René Morales joins the ranks of well-known and critically acclaimed writers such as David Cruz from Costa Rica, Maurice Echeverría from Guatemala, and the Garífuna poet, Wingston González, featured in Asymptote’s Summer 2018 Issue.

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