Legna Rodríguez Iglesias has quickly become one of the most celebrated Cuban poets writing today. Her intense – often confrontational – poetry refuses to conform, subverting expectations and challenging social mores. Particularly arresting is her uncomfortable focus on the human body, which she dramatises in isolation, stripping it of context, making it strange and even obscene. Alongside poems of extreme descriptive vigour, Rodríguez Iglesias irreverently skewers the hypocrisies, clichés and hierarchies of our time.

Rodríguez Iglesias was born in Camaguey, Cuba in 1984. She works in a variety of genres, including poetry, short stories, novels, children’s books and theatre. She has won a number of prestigious national and international prizes; most recently she was awarded the 2016 Premio Paz in Miami for her collection of poems, Miami Century Fox.

This UK will include events at three literature festivals in Manchester, Ilkley and Sheffield, a visit with the Poetry Translation Workshop to translate another Cuban poet Jamila Medina Ríos and a grand finale in the British Library organised by the young Poet In The City Producers hosted by Brazilian-British artist and activist Joana Nastari, the writer and performer of the award-winning show Fuck You, Pay Me.

The Book

This tour marks the launch of her dual-language collection A little body are many parts, the most comprehensive collection of her poetry in any language. This selection offers a broad survey of Rodríguez Iglesias’s work, drawing on eight previous collections in Spanish. Throughout, the poems are inflected with Cuban history and explore the tensions between the generation of the Revolution and her own. The consequences of poet’s long-term residence in Miami are forcefully brought home through poems of emigration and estrangement. The exceptional skill and formal dexterity that marks Rodríguez Iglesias’s work in Spanish has been expertly brought to life in English by the poet Abigail Parry, and writer Serafina Vick.

Order a copy of A little body are many parts from the PTC shop today.

Poets and Translators

Legna Rodríguez Iglesias was born in Camagüey, Cuba in 1984. She works in a variety of genres, including poetry, short stories, novels, children’s books and theatre. She has won a number of prestigious national and international prizes; most recently she was awarded the Premio Paz in 2016 in Miami for her collection of poems, Miami Century Fox.

Abigail Parry's first collection, Jinx, is published by Bloodaxe, and deals in trickery, gameplay, masks and costume. The poems have won a number of awards, including the Ballymaloe Prize, the Troubadour Prize and an Eric Gregory Award. A chapbook of her translations of antique Spanish love poems, Death by Hearts and Flowers, is published by Laudanum.

Serafina Vick graduated from King’s College London in 2015 with a First Class degree in French and Hispanic Studies. She started translating Cuban poetry in 2014 whilst studying in Havana. Her translations have been featured in Modern Poetry in Translation and Bogota 39, and on BBC Radio 4. She lives in Havana, where she’s currently working on her first novel.