Imagined Conversations with Caribbean Poets

This essay investigates the web of capitalism, property, empire, and incarceration as it contemplates the work of two twenty-first-century poets, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera and José Ramón Sánchez Leyva, based in Puerto Rico and Cuba, respectively. Salas Rivera's collection Lo terciario / The Tertiary interrogates the Puerto Rican debt crisis, and While They Sleep (Under the Bed Is Another Country) focuses on the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Sánchez Leyva's work, which examines the relationship between the US naval base and the Cuban city of Guantánamo, offers an ideal site at which to examine contradictions embodied by Guantánamo, including the way the US base functions as the distilled essence of the US imperial project, its contradictions pointing to the larger contradictions of US Empire. The author not only analyzes Sánchez Leyva's poetry but also produces some of the first English-language translations of these poems.