About this item
Highlights
- Rosie Prohías Driscoll was enthralled from an early age by the family stories recounted by her mother, grandmother, and great aunts about their lives in Cuba before the family was exiled to the United States.
- Author(s): Rosie Prohías Driscoll
- 88 Pages
- Poetry, American
Description
About the Book
In her debut poetry collection, Rosie Prohías Driscoll excavates her family's roots in Cuba and her memories of growing up as a first-generation Cuban-American to tell a story of loss and resurrection that spans five generations.
Book Synopsis
Rosie Prohías Driscoll was enthralled from an early age by the family stories recounted by her mother, grandmother, and great aunts about their lives in Cuba before the family was exiled to the United States. At the same time, she felt a void left by the untimely death of her father and the lost connection to his family who stayed on the island. In her debut poetry collection, Poised for Flight, Prohías Driscoll excavates these family roots to uncover a poignant story of loss and resurrection spanning five generations. In the telling, she cultivates trees and intertwines branches where her children - and the readers of her poems - can find shelter and firm footing for flight.
Review Quotes
The poems in Rosie Prohías Driscoll's debut collection are stepping stones through the liminal spaces which marry the past and present: dual heritages, bilingual explorations into the ways we carry our ancestors in language, memory, and faith. Through a language of her own belonging and with skillfully crafted images and metaphors, Prohías Driscoll fathoms the power of transience and inheritance, all of us pajaritos in flight.-Richard Blanco, 2013 Presidential Inaugural Poet, author of How to Love a Country
The poems in Poised for Flight take readers on an intergenerational family journey full of yearning, adventure, and intimacy. In this memoir-in-verse, Rosie Prohías Driscoll traverses her family's past, present, and imagined futures from Cuba to the United States and back. "Cuéntame // Mami, tell me a story / count me," she writes, exposing a fundamental truth-that storytelling is a form of taking stock, of asserting who and what counts. Throughout the collection Prohías Driscoll grounds readers with visceral, embodied details and releases them into the airy world of words at play. Her poems, like her children, "live beyond / the plots we have prepared for them." And while it may be true that "En Cuba no hay papel / ni pá los médicos escribir recetas," Prohías Driscoll teaches us it's not in the sheets of paper, but in the stories themselves-told and retold across the generations-that we come to appreciate what counts most.-Li Yun Alvarado, author of Words or Water
In Poised for Flight, Rosie Prohías Driscoll beautifully braids cultures, languages, and generations-poem by poem, stanza by stanza, line by line. Through her memories, you'll experience the subtleties of love and loss. Through her stories, you'll understand the intricacies of joy and heartache. This debut collection brims with heart and history; faith and strength. It will leave readers asking the author for more please/¡más, por favor!-Dawn Leas, author of A Person Worth Knowing, Take Something When You Go, and I Know When to Keep Quiet