{"id":46,"date":"2019-03-04T23:09:01","date_gmt":"2019-03-04T23:09:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bessyreyna.com\/?page_id=46"},"modified":"2023-11-14T15:07:06","modified_gmt":"2023-11-14T15:07:06","slug":"books","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/bessyreyna.com\/index.php\/books\/","title":{"rendered":"Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\" \"\" <\/em><\/strong>\"\"<\/p>\n

Memoirs of the Unfaithful Lover<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThe title poem provides the emotional center of this volume in which Bessy Reyna reaches an intense emotional level in each love poem.\u201d
\n\u2014Roberto Fernandez Iglesias<\/p>\n

\u201cLike Panama, the country of her childhood, Bessy Reyna\u2019s poems provide a channel, a way to bridge east and \u00a0west by reconciling the warring needs of the body, the mind and the heart. Whether Reyna is dancing with a stalk \u00a0of 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.\u201d
\n\u2014Vivian Shipley<\/p>\n

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The Battlefield of Your Body<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cBessy Reyna knows the importance of language \u2018The last time we used \/ silence as bullets \/ we were mortally wounded \/ in the conflict,\u2019 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 \u2013 a territory where, crossing \u2018the frontiers of desire,\u2019 even \u2018life and death dissolve\u2019.\u201d
\n\u2014Martha Collins<\/p>\n

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She Remembers<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cReyna 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.\u201d
\n\u2014Laurel Speer<\/p>\n

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