Have You Been Long Enough At Table
Description
“Marvelous.”—Terrance Hayes
Taking its title from Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Leslie Sainz’s Have You Been Long Enough at Table explores the personal and historical tragedies of the Cuban American experience through a distinctly feminine lens. Formally diverse with echoes of Spanish throughout, this debut collection critiques power and patriarchy as weaponized by the governments of the United States and the Republic of Cuba. In investigating the realities of displacement and inherited exile, Sainz honors her imagined past, present, and future as a result of the “revolution within the revolution”—the emancipation of Cuban women.
Through lyric and associative meditations, Sainz anatomizes the unique grief of immigrant daughters, as her speakers discover how family can be a microcosm of the very violence that displaced them. What emerges is a spiritual blueprint for disinheritance, radical self-determination, and the nuanced examinations of myth, ritual, and resistance.
Praise for Have You Been Long Enough At Table
Sugar is a recurring motif in this debut collection by the daughter of Cuban exiles, whose poems address life after the revolution & especially the role of women.
— The New York Times Book Review
Sainz creates assemblages of spiky surfaces and eye-catching asymmetries. . . . having her poetry both ways, alternating an idiosyncratic squint with an eye for geopolitical change and mercurial family dynamics.
— Poetry Foundation
So many of Sainz’s lines carry the weight of a culture—poet as medium. . . . Ambitious. . . . A promising debut.
— The Millions, A Must Read Poetry Collection of Summer
Glorious. . . .Experiments with form as well as queer and feminist lenses to grapple with the idea of exile, immigration, queer women, mothers and daughters, and more.
— Shondaland
Striking. . . . a deep pleasure. . . . [Sainz is] an artist unafraid to hold space for multitudes of meaning.
— Los Angeles Review of Books
Bubbles over with poetic range.
— Chicago Review of Books
Have You Been Long Enough at Table marries emotion and song with sorrow and displacement in a haunting book of poetry that lives longer than the pages it’s printed on.
— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Puts debut author Leslie Sainz’s prowess on full display, quickly asserting Sainz as an essential voice in Latinx poetics.
— Poetry Question
Masterful. . . . lyrically innovative, politically complex & simply a pleasure to read.
— The Adroit Journal
Reminds us that history is not a prize to be won, it is a story with macrocosmic and personal dimensions and Sainz’s moving collection is always the type of work we should read alongside the textbooks.
— Verse Curious
Sensitive. . . . Explorations of cultural identity run as deep as the language in which the verse is written. . . . dotted with neatly-timed wit and a sure sense of irony.
— Sounds and Colors
Have You Been Long Enough at Table is both a question and an invitation in Leslie Sainz’s marvelous debut. Sainz probes spirituality with the verve and vitality of Emily Dickinson if Dickinson had been born Cuban American at the end of the last century. Sainz probes the overlap of imagination and experience like Sylvia Plath if Plath was born to a Cuban American landscape between “field crickets, memory, lesser parasites” and “the stain of guava on a plastic cutting board.” Have You Been Long Enough at Table articulates the bonds and tensions of independence and tradition, spirit and form, home and exile. The narratives ring with the integrity of memoir and the inventiveness of allegory. Nature, politics, and humor overlap in an image where “The Black Wasps wear green berets.” Story is transformed into spell, chant, beat: “Mothers, wives, sisters, daughters radiating as verbs under a mahogany roof.” These lyrics of “the land—much in us still” are classic and altogether new. Leslie Sainz is a poet who has been long at the table reading and writing poems and long at the table listening to the poetry of culture and family. She makes questions invitations and memory visible. Come bear witness to a remarkable poet bearing witness.
— Terrance Hayes, author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
Sainz’s debut poetry collection is a triumph, deftly capturing vivid images of displacement, and transcending borders and language. Cuba is the pounding heart of these poems.
— Richard Blanco, author of How to Love a Country
The music in this book is able to combine not just melody but also emotion. The emotion here isn't just heart but also a thoughtful exploration. The thought here isn't just ideas but a deepening journey. There is much to love in Have You Been Long Enough at Table—but most of all I love its variousness, that's music itself.
— Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic
From sonnets for deities to poems for mothers, women, and family, this collection exists beautifully at the intersection of mythology and history, both personal and political. Just like its title, this book asks questions that resist simple answers, all the while giving us moments of tenderness, like this one: 'The orchids are lovely / this time of year / and the women, writing.
— Zeina Hashem Beck, author of O
