tasks

by Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, Katherine M. Hedeen (Translator)

Víctor Rodríguez Núñez's tasks [tareas] is an award-winning poetry collection, the recipient of Spain's Rincón de la Victoria Prize in 2010 and published there by the prestigious press Renacimiento in 2011. With striking images and memorable verses, tasks creates a testament to the poet's unique migratory experience. While seemingly the chronicle of an immigrant who returns to his native country, the poem really asks how to return if you've never actually left. Using rigorous formal aspects to create a sense of pushing beyond known limits, this innovative long poem has at its core a rethinking of the experience of otherness, in which identification—both with memory and quotidian experience and with place tangled in subjectivity—prevails over any kind of differentiation. This leads not only to a profound questioning of nationalism but also of cultural identity itself. The result, which Katherine M. Hedeen renders for Anglophone readers, is a fluid poetic subject who disrespects borders and privileges movement over fixedness.

Genres: Poetry

146 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2011

About the author

Víctor Rodríguez Núñez is one of Cuba's most outstanding and celebrated contemporary writers, with over fifty collections of his poetry published throughout the world. He has been the recipient of major awards all over the Spanish-speaking region, including, in 2015, the coveted Loewe Prize. He is the author of From a Red Barn (co- im-press, 2020), Night Badly Written (Action Books, 2017), and tasks (co-im-press, 2016). He divides his time between Gambier, Ohio, where he is currently Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College, and Havana, Cuba.

Reviews

[Cody Stetzel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think these poems are excellent, and if I'm being honest, helped to pull me out of my own task-oriented funk. So long are we caught in the doldrums of solution-orientation, of production-orientation, that to really sit with the idea of a task and decipher what it means to be tasked, one might understand that a task is not all. So much of Núñez' work here intends to pull the metaphysical and the spirit's behavior into questioning and account for these observations, images, and experiences that avoid falling neatly into the definition of a task.