Have You Been Long Enough at Table - Paperback

by Leslie Sainz (Author)

Winner of the Publishing Triangle Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry

Finalist for the Vermont Book Award

Finalist for the New England Book Award

Finalist for the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award

"Marvelous."--Terrance Hayes

Taking its title from Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, Leslie Sainz's Have You Been Long Enough at Table explores the personal and historical tragedies of the Cuban American experience through a distinctly feminine lens. Formally diverse with echoes of Spanish throughout, this debut collection critiques power and patriarchy as weaponized by the governments of the United States and the Republic of Cuba. In investigating the realities of displacement and inherited exile, Sainz honors her imagined past, present, and future as a result of the "revolution within the revolution"--the emancipation of Cuban women.

Through lyric and associative meditations, Sainz anatomizes the unique grief of immigrant daughters, as her speakers discover how family can be a microcosm of the very violence that displaced them. What emerges is a spiritual blueprint for disinheritance, radical self-determination, and the nuanced examinations of myth, ritual, and resistance.

Author Biography

The daughter of Cuban exiles, Leslie Sainz is the recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. Her work has appeared in the Yale Review, New England Review, Kenyon Review Online, AGNI, jubilat, Narrative, and elsewhere. A three-time National Poetry Series finalist, she's received scholarships, fellowships, and honors from CantoMundo, Miami Writers Institute, the Adroit Journal, and Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts at Bucknell University. She is the managing editor of the New England Review.