Carolina Hospital
Carolina Hospital, is a poet, prose writer, and editor. Her works include the poetry collections Key West Nights and Other Aftershocks (Anhinga Press) and The Child of Exile: A Poetry Memoir (Arte Público Press), as well as Myth America and How to Get into Trouble (Anhinga Press), both collaborative collections with Maureen Seaton, Holly Iglesias, and Nicole Hospital-Medina; plus, the novel A Little Love, under the pen name C. C. Medina (Warner Books). She also collaborated with South Florida writers on the New York Times bestselling novel Naked Came the Manatee.She edited Los Atrevidos: Cuban American Writers (Ediciones Ellas/Linden Lane Press), a groundbreaking anthology of Cuban Americans writing in English, as well as A Century of Cuban Writers in Florida (Pineapple Press). She wrote the lyrics to the song cycle Greetings from Florida: Postcards from Paradise by composer and UF Assistant Professor Scott Lee released as a CD. Her most recent poetry collection Bamboo Ghost Notes was published as a numbered limited edition by Contagioso Press.
ALL ROADS LEAD TO HERE BY CAROLINA HOSPITAL
$20.00 ISBN # 978-1-934695-97-5
Part recovery journal, part portrait gallery, Key West Nights takes Hospital into uncharted territory, emotionally as well as culturally. The book confirms Hopsital’s place as a strong, distinctive voice in Latino poetry. — Gustavo Perez Firmat
Rendered with “the brushstroke of memory” Key West Nights and Other Aftershocks is a haunting, intimate journey through a landscape of loss and redemption. These poems are of abundance and mercy, shaped by the exile’s singular history, and guarded by the better angles of compassion and truth. It’s an elegant and impressive collection. —Sylvia Curbelo
The poems in ALL ROADS LEAD TO HERE, Carolina Hospital’s third solo collection, expose tensions between loss and love, youth and wisdom, hope and reality. Transformative moments capture womanhood, the trauma of illness, the exile experience, and nature’s forces interacting with the human through an exacting eye. The book pulls from the author’s experiences of displacement, which insistently lead her back to the sea. Hospital weaves past with present, offering glimpses into the trajectory of her life, while braiding images of the sea, a powerful and constant magnet. Readers accompany the poet through an intimately layered and unraveling journey that simultaneously intrigues and moves. “All Roads Lead to Here is steeped in the present tense of nature. It is a salve in troubled times.” — Mia Leonin
REFRACTED
At 16, life was a black-and-white
film washed in shadows.
Vested uniform and stale homework,
parents at war, war abroad,
hearings and resignations.
I planned to make my way alone,
but without waves is there an ocean?
without moon, a night?
You came, pockets stuffed with colors.
Slowly you released them
and I held each one up to the light.
Madre de aguas
The dream spews elaborate tiles,
paladares and sobs.
Nothing is
as it’s supposed to be
wood and water
The woman reaches
for this lament that pours over her
grips earth and tape grass
beneath the river.
Are my arms dissolving into sand?
My eyes rolling black pebbles?
My breath the current?