Moving between the speech and silence of a woman struggling to speak freely, Ruth Behar embarks on a poetic voyage into her own vulnerability and the sacrifices of her exiled ancestors as she tries to understand love, loss, regret, and the things we keep and carry with us. Behar’s vivid renderings of wilted gardens, crashing waves, and firefly-lit nights recall the imagery of her inspiration, Dulce María Loynaz, who is often known as the Cuban Emily Dickinson. Presented in a beautiful bilingual English-Spanish edition—Behar serves as her own translator—Everything I Kept/Todo lo que guardé will haunt readers with the cries and whispers which illuminate the human spirit and the spectrum of emotions that make for a life and lives well-remembered.
Industry Reviews
"Behar serves us her first book of poetry, aged like a fine bottle of rum, in a beautiful bilingual edition with illustrations by the Cuban artist Rolando Estevez. Everything I Kept/Todo lo que guarde evokes the friendships, failures, mishaps, and adventures of a poet who has traveled across continents, cultures, and eras... Everything I Kept lingers long after we finish reading it, making a definitive space for itself in the panorama of contemporary Spanish-American poetry."-- "Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas"
"And this sense of fragility never leaves the poet, who makes of it a home. Perhaps this is precisely one of the things this book achieves by trading emphatic images for the contours of the ungraspable: memory, remembering things that are no longer here but that remain in everyday life --the telephone ringing while the poem insists on being written; the tree with its gift of indifference; the wine and candles of an anniversary celebration. The images of daily life, which vanish like smoke yet stay with us. In this sense, Everything I Kept lingers long after we finish reading it, making a definitive space for itself in the panorama of contemporary Spanish-American poetry."--Jesus Jambrina "La Torre del Virrey"
"Behar's latest volume of poetry, Everything I Kept: Todo Lo Que Guarde, embodies her ongoing desire to present the duality of her history. . . . Behar's work beautifully encapsulates the Cuban Jewish conundrum of shuffling between two distinct homelands."-- "Jewish Boston"
"With Everything I Kept, Ruth Behar inserts herself into the expanding canon of Cuban women's writing, beyond any circumstantial divisions or geographic or emotional borders. Indebted to the most important women poets of Latin America and especially to Dulce Maria Loynaz, Ruth Behar takes poetry to the extremely subtle zones that form individuality. Over the course of this book she creates a unique lyrical discourse, expressing it at times in words and at times into silences, in which texts link up with other texts to form the history of a woman on a voyage across the waters. Here is the ocean, separating and mediating. And here is all the water, able to give new life to any harvest, clean away any grime, and even flood and bring down every dam. On a first reading, these poems seem aimed at a common story of love, but once the subtle rains and the storms of summer appear, a different story becomes perceptible, the story of a life marked by voyages toward the self, in which the other--the others--appear as the only possible extensions of the author's poetry and of her life itself."-- "Rolando Estevez, co-founder and editor of Ediciones Vigia and founder of Edicion El Fortin in Cuba"
