"Orbes 1959-2016 es un poemario excepcional. Con intelecto diáfano y maestría verbal, Mecedes Cortázar crea aquí un complejo tapiz de sensaciones visuales, auditivas y táctiles. Ciudades y mapas sirven de marco a reflexiones poético-filosóficas sobre el ser y el sentir. No importa lo que esté describiendo, bien sea una multitud en confusión, un mapamundi antiguo, el cosmos de una naranja o Afrodita cabalgando, la poeta logra imprimir sus imágenes con gran destreza en nuestra memoria. Este es un libro de tonos variados y aguzadas alusiones vitales en el que con sabia mordacidad Mercedes logra un inusitado canto a la vida como una aventura desquiciada". Prof. Dra. Carlota Caulfield, Profesora de Español y Estudios Hispanoamericanos, Mills College, Oakland, California Orbes 1959-2016 contains the collected poetry of Mercedes Cortázar up to the time of publication. "Orbes 1959-2016 is an exceptional book of poems. With crystal clear intellect and verbal mastery, Mercedes Cortázar creates here a complex tapestry of visual, auditory and tactile sensations. Cities and maps are used as a framework for poetic-philosophical reflections about being and feeling. It does not matter what is being described, a crowd in confusion, an old mappa mundi, the cosmos in an orange, or Aphrodite riding the waves, the poet is able to imprint her images with great dexterity in our memory. This is a book of various and sharp, vital allusions, in which with wise and biting wit Mercedes succeeds in creating a chant to "life as an unhinged adventure." --Carlota Caufield Professor of Spanish and Spanish American Studies W. M. Keck Professor in Creative Writing Mills College, Oakland, California This is the most chilling and distressing statement in Cuban poetry posterior to 1959 with respect to the tangle of negativities and dispersions faced by a nation that has not been possible in its totality. Compiled here are more than fifty years of a poetic oeuvre up to the present time, dispersed in a multitude of publications or, in the most lamentable of cases, unpublished, of one of the most vigorous voices in Cuban poetry. Orbes 1959-2016 represents a will power of poetic justice and literary archaeology that is an essential contribution not only to the work of the poet, but also to that of the Cuban literary community in exile, of the Latinos residing in the United States, and lastly to the study of postrevolutionary Cuban literature. --Alberto Abreu Arcia, literary critic and author of Short Story Writers of El Puente and Silences in the Cuban Narrative Canon; For a Black Cuba: Literature, Race and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century; and other titles key to understanding the evolution of post-revolutionary Cuba
About the Author: Born in Havana, Cuba, Mercedes Cortázar resides in the US, of which she is a naturalized citizen. Her autobiographical novel and books of short stories and creative nonfiction are in process of preparation for publication. Cortázar was a founding member of the generation of Cuban poets and writers in Havana called El Puente (The Bridge), a movement in process of rediscovery at the present time. Cortázar's first book of poetry, El largo canto (The Long Chant), was the third book published by El Puente, and her work was included in El Puente's first poetry anthology, La novísima poesía cubana I (The Newest Cuban Poetry I). In response to El Puente's avant-garde editorial policy, and also because it had published Cortázar's work after she had gone into exile in the United States, the publishing house was closed by the Cuban Government and its members persecuted. Cortázar continued to write in New York while working in factories and restaurants, and at other blue-collar jobs. Her poems attracted the attention of Chilean literary critic and translator Servando Sacaluga, a professor of French at Columbia University, who translated her poems in Deux Poèmes de Mercedes Cortázar (1965), a bilingual Spanish-French edition of El largo canto (The Long Chant) and another long poem, Tierra (Earth). With a group of El Puente poets living in New York, Cortázar founded Protesta (Protest), considered to be the first literary magazine of Cuban writers in exile. She later joined with Cuban and Puerto Rican poets in New York to found La nueva sangre (The New Blood), a literary magazine that published Spanish-language writers and poets living in the US, Latin America and Spain. Cortázar's poems, stories, articles, essays and literary criticism in Spanish have appeared in publications including Mundo Nuevo (New World), published and edited in Paris by Uruguyan literary critic Emir Rodríguez Monegal, the first critic to describe the Boom in Latin American literature; Mexican literary magazine El corno emplumado (The Feathered Horn); and Spain's cultural magazine Turia. Cortázar's English-language articles and criticism have appeared in Review, a bi-monthly magazine published by the Center for Inter-American Relations, and elsewhere. Cortázar was poetry consultant for the English translation of José Lezama Lima's Paradiso, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and she is a past recipient of the Cintas Fellowship for Literature.