Garden of Exile
By Aleida Rodríguez

Winner of the 1998 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry

"This is a first book of remarkable range and maturity, which, while revealing its roots, displays the fruit and flower of its branches. The river of Rodríguez’s memory is fed by two languages; her perceptions have the acuity of double vision, which is at once the privilege and the scourge of the bilingual and the bicultural writer. . . . Rodríguez is . . . adept with fixed forms whose containment liberates volatile subject matter, and with the prose poem in which the familiar becomes profoundly strange and the strange, familiar, through the intensity and clarity of the writer’s gaze."

—from the Foreword by Marilyn Hacker

"Aleida Rodríguez is a great lover of the given world. So grounded, she freely regards everything (and measures nothing). "Aphrodite sharpens" the acute sensual memory and fine sound of her poems. They are nourished by verbal roots that run deep and wide—not just from California to Cuba, but down into the human psyche, were it longs to be opened upward into the light. Garden of Exile is an Eden of newness and surprises and unabashed pleasure."

—Marie Ponsot, author of The Bird Catcher and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry

"For Rodríguez, paradise is not so much a place as a condition, its joys proportional to the attention we pay to the everyday world. In poem after poem, she not only visits the garden she has made of her early displacement, she also visits upon that displacement the rigor and insight of language. And what language! Here is a poet whose words can conjure, clarify, anatomize, and praise—often all at once. An extraordinary, sensual collection."

—Bernard Cooper, author of Truth Serum and Maps to Anywhere, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award

Garden of Exile, a debut collection of poems by Aleida Rodríguez, reveals a life enriched by layers of language and culture. Rodríguez was born in Cuba and emigrated to the United States at age nine via Operation Peter Pan. These poems are psalms that celebrate the pleasures of experience made palpable through language.

Rodríguez counts her bilingual lexicon as a double blessing: "Earth’s language is a continuous current, / translating the voices of my early trees along the ground. / I can’t afford not to listen." In her liminal world, the lyricism of Spanish and English mingle their most gorgeous incarnations: sinsontes, ciruelas, mamoncillos, meringue clouds, and the cluck of coconuts "deliver a lost dictionary of delight."

Rodríguez is a remarkably deft poet: not only is she fluent in two tongues, she articulates the delicate nuances of daily life. Whether speaking of water, flora, or women in love, she refuses to produce the poof of easy lyric like a rabbit from a hat. Though they nod to heady pleasures, these poems keep their wits. Rodríguez remains self-possessed, intelligent, and interesting, even in her most impassioned moments. She reveals perception as the self’s real alchemy and, by so doing, makes the world appear right before our very eyes.

Aleida Rodríguez was born on a kitchen table in Güines, Havana. Her poetry and prose have been published in many literary magazines, textbooks, and anthologies nationwide, including In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction (W.W. Norton, 1996), The Spoon River Poetry Review (whose Editors’ Prize she won in 1996), Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and The Kenyon Review. She has been a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the Brody Arts Fund. She lives in Los Angeles.