2026
Sonata de la lluvia
Not a single poem but a sonata in three movements, one hundred and fifty lines of décima, each movement with its own tempo marking and its own epigraph borrowed from a Cuban songwriter. It can be read here in full.
Read in Spanish, here, complete
There is a decision behind this section that is worth stating plainly. The poems are not translated, and there is no plan to translate them in order to publish them here. They are published complete, in Spanish, because a very large number of people in the United States read poetry in Spanish and are not well served by having it handed to them in English.
Everything written about the poems is in English. The poems themselves are in the language they were written in.
What a décima is
Worth explaining, because it does not exist in English and it is central to what this poet does. The décima, or espinela, is a ten-line stanza in octosyllables with a fixed rhyme scheme, settled in Spain in the sixteenth century and naturalised in Cuba so completely that it became the country's oral and written verse form at once: sung in the countryside, improvised in competition, and written on the page by its most literary poets.
It is closed, difficult and popular at the same time. A good décima has to turn its argument inside ten lines and land on the last one. English has no equivalent, which is exactly why it is interesting to bring across.
The glosa goes one step further. The poet takes a stanza by another poet and answers it line by line, ending each of their own stanzas on one of the borrowed lines, in order, until the original is returned whole. Eight of the poems published here are glosas answering José Martí and José Lezama Lima. Those borrowed lines belong to their authors and are always printed apart, with the name of whoever wrote them.
Recent awards
2026
Tres delirios y un desnudo
A triptych in twelve décimas. Literary erotica, written for adult readers, and formally the most demanding thing in this section: the erotic tradition and the strictest Spanish stanza in the same room.
2005
Trampas, retratos y un 17 rojo
The author's only poetry collection to date, shared with María del Carmen Mestas, in free verse, and Marcel Luerio, in haiku. His own part is a sequence of erotic décimas. Rights available cover solely the poems he wrote. Five completed poetry collections remain unpublished.
For publishers and editors
Two things are available here, and they are not the same offer.
The first is a Spanish-language collection. Five finished manuscripts are unpublished and looking for a house, and no translation is involved. For a Spanish-language imprint in the United States or in Spain, this is a book that could be read this month.
The second is a bilingual edition. The décima is a formal problem worth an ambitious translator, and a facing-page edition is the honest way to publish it in English. Anyone interested in that conversation should write.