The African Cuban poet Nancy Morejón set out at a young age to explore the beauty and complexities of the life around and within her. Themes of social and political concern, loyalty, friendship and family, African identity, women's experiences, and hope for Cuba's future all found their way into her poems through bold metaphor and tender lyricism. This panoramic anthology, selected from ten volumes of Morejón's work and organized by theme, contains some poems that have already been acclaimed in several languages, others that are less known, and some never before published. Overall they present to Morejón's readership an enhanced, broader, and updated spectrum of her poetry in a Spanish-English edition.

Although Morejón does not sympathize as much with intellectualized feminism as with street feminism (the kind that erupts with force as it confronts daily life), her poems illuminate issues in women's existence. Without intending to, she has revitalized contemporary Caribbean feminist literary discourse. One can find in her work the tensions between colonizer and colonized, dominator and dominated, and at the same time enjoy the sheer beauty of images depicting suffering, strength, and hope.

Winner of two prestigious Cuban awards, the Premio Nacional de Literatura Cubana and Premio de la Critica, Nancy Morejón is a poet, essayist, critic, editor, journalist, and translator. She was born in the Los Sitios district of Central Havana in 1944. Her first book, Mutismos, was published in 1962, and she has collaborated throughout her career with leading musicians, playwrights, and actors. She now directs the Caribbean Studies Center at Casa de las Américas, Havana, epicenter of Cuban and Latin American intelligentsia.

Juanamaría Cordones-Cook is associate professor at University of Missouri, Columbia. She is author of Teatro negro uruguayo (Editorial Graffiti, 1996) and Poetica de transgresión en la novelística de Luisa Valenzuela (Peter Lang Publishing, 1991). Member of the Uruguayan Academy of Letters.