Pérez and Truitt will perform and read, among others, the new works Cubanology (Station Hill) and Heresway (MadHat). 

In 2002, while temporarily living in Europe (mostly Amsterdam), the poet Omar Pérez began writing in a notebook. His journey began as a short professional visit that shifted into something less defined after he fell in love. Eventually the notebook became Cubanology, a book of days reflecting on three years of life at a remove from the island: “A memory of a flight, a journey, jour.” Along with registering common and uncommon vicissitudes of everyday life, the result presents a fusion of languages. Simultaneously national and polycultural, Cubanology streams poetic thought and experience, excerpts from other writings in progress, and the coalescence of a new islandic consciousness – scenes reminiscent of many-minded Odysseus, if home were heart. Visual material appearing throughout Cubanologyblends Pérez’s sketches with photographs from that period, as well as art he made after returning to his family home on Havana’s iconic Malécon. 

Omar Pérez is an award-winning writer who has long pursued unexpected transformations. He won Cuba’s 2010 Nicolás Guillén Prize for Poetry for Crítica de la razón puta (Critique of Fuckup Reason). His poetry collection Algo de lo sagrado (released in a bilingual edition from Factory School as Something of the Sacred) is often cited as one of the most significant works of his generation.  A bilingual edition of his later book of poems, Did You Hear About the Fighting Cat? (Oíste hablar del gato de pelea?), was published by Shearsman Books in 2010. Critics have framed some of his work in relation to Latin America’s “poesía civil” tradition. Pérez unsettles civic discourse with interference from Zen Buddhism, multilingualism, passages of children’s verse and popular music, humor, and more.  He is also a prizewinning essayist, a literary translator, an editor, and a carpenter.  A charismatic presenter, Pérez has become increasingly committed to exploring interdisciplinary arts and performance, including collaborations with experimental dancers and musicians.  In 2014 he was a Fellow with the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, and he has presented his work in many countries around the world.

Heresway is a collection of terse poems that riff on certain balances, or rhymes—“here” and “sway” being one among a host of others—composed in the Catskill Mountains, which constitutes their affiliate topography. This book is Sam Truitt’s homage to the sun, breath, psyche, etc., and most of all rhyme itself in its broadest sense, and seeks through such enactment to expose in as clear and simple terms as possible our raw human condition—and that nothing is not as it seems. Heresway is the tenth installment of Vertical Elegies, a long-term project the overarching structure and intent of which remains to be seen, though one determination, according to Truitt, is that the “vertical” is down—and from here you can advance a way there now. 

Sam Truitt is the author of the ten books in the Vertical Elegies series including Heresway (MadHat 2018), Dick: A Vertical Elegy (Lunar Chandelier, 2014), Vertical Elegies 6: Street Mete (Station Hill, 2011), Vertical Elegies: Three Works (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008), and Vertical Elegies 5: The Section (Georgia, 2003). There are also four audio-visual books in the Vertical Elegies series. He is the co-editor of In|Filtration: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry from the Hudson River Valley; andEating the Colors of a Lineup of Words: The Early Books of Bernadette Mayer. He was born in Washington, DC, and raised there and in Tokyo, Japan. He has a PhD from the University of Albany and a MFA from Brown University. The director of Station Hill Press, he lives in Woodstock, New York. For more, including links to AV material: www.samtruitt.org.