Memoirs of the Unfaithful Lover
“The title poem provides the emotional center of this volume in which Bessy Reyna reaches an intense emotional level in each love poem.”
—Roberto Fernandez Iglesias
“Like Panama, the country of her childhood, Bessy Reyna’s poems provide a channel, a way to bridge east and west by reconciling the warring needs of the body, the mind and the heart. Whether Reyna is dancing with a stalk of sugar cane in Hartford, Connecticut, or in her birthplace of Cuba, poem after poem is as lively as a salsa. Like chewing sugar cane, her poems ultimately reward with their hard-won sweetness, with the taste that leaves us wanting more.”
—Vivian Shipley
The Battlefield of Your Body
“Bessy Reyna knows the importance of language ‘The last time we used / silence as bullets / we were mortally wounded / in the conflict,’ she says in the title poem of this new collection. Bilingual and bicultural, Reyna uses poetry both to confront and to stretch the boundaries of our ordinary thinking. Her poems cross borders of time as well as place, taking us to a territory where past and present, the personal and the political, even love and hate inform each other – a territory where, crossing ‘the frontiers of desire,’ even ‘life and death dissolve’.”
—Martha Collins
She Remembers
“Reyna is an acute observer and feeler of the subtleties of experience and has all the words to re-create these for readers who might never have lived anywhere close to her world.”
—Laurel Speer