In the Vortex of the Cyclone

The first-ever bilingual anthology by the Afro-Cuban poet Excilia Saldana contains a wide-ranging selection of her work, from lullabies to an erotic letter, from lengthy autobiographical poems to quiet reflections on her Caribbean island as the inspiration for her writing. She celebrates her African ancestry with poems that are filled with the flora and fauna of Afro-Cuban rituals. She explores her feminine rites of passage in the context of her country's momentous journey. In these poems, Saldana weaves the personal, the mythical, and the literary, bringing together the domestic with the transcendental, the temporal with the eternal. Known in Cuba as a poet, essayist, translator, and professor, Saldana won the prestigious Nicholas Guillen Award for Distinction in Poetry in 1998 and the La Rosa Blanca Prize for La Noche, a children's book, in 1989. Before her death in 1999, most of her work had appeared in Spanish exclusively in Cuba with only scattered translations. This collection emphasizes her construction of a personal and poetic autobiography to reveal the identity of one of the best Afro-Caribbean poets of the twentieth century.