Biblioasis 2024
Friday, December 5, 2025
Thursday, December 4, 2025
Wednesday, December 3, 2025
STEVE CROPPER ~
Steve Cropper, Guitarist, Songwriter and a Shaper of Memphis Soul Music, Dies at 84
As a member of Booker T. & the MG’s and as a producer, he played a pivotal role in the rise of Stax Records, a storied force in R&B in the 1960s and ’70s.
Steve Cropper in 1973. His guitar licks could be heard in hits by Otis Redding, Sam & Dave and Wilson Pickett, among many others.
Tuesday, December 2, 2025
Monday, December 1, 2025
Sunday, November 30, 2025
NICOLAS GUILLEN ~
NOTICE
By resolution of the Local Authority
this great zoo was created
for natives and foreigners
and the pride of our nation.
Among the most prized specimens
are the water and wind animals
(as in the case of the hurricane),
also, a real live Aconcagua,
a teenage guitar,
living clouds,
one professor monkey, and another embryonic one.
Fatherland or Death?
THE DIRECTOR
THE CARIBBEAN
In the aquarium of the Great Zoo
the Caribbean slips by.
This animal,
enigmatic and maritime,
has a crest of crystal glass,
a blue back, a green tail,
an underbelly of compact corral,
and the gray fins of a hurricane.
On the aquarium, this inscription:
"Caution: it bites."
GUITAR
They went out hunting for guitars,
underneath the full moon.
And they brought back her:
pale, fine, lithe,
ceaseless mulata eyes,
a waist of open wood.
She's young, just barely flies.
But already she sings
when she hears, in other cages,
the flittering wings of sones and coplas.
His somber sones and her lonely coplas.
On her cage is this inscription:
"Caution: she dreams."
THE RIVERS
Here is the serpent's cage.
Coiled up on themselves,
the rivers, the sacred rivers, sleep.
The Mississippi with its Blacks,
the Amazon with its Indians.
They are like the powerful springs
of gigantic trailer trucks.
Laughing, children toss them
little green living islands,
parrot-painted jungles,
manned canoes,
and other rivers.
The great rivers wake up,
uncoil themselves slowly,
gobble down everything, swell, almost bursting,
and then go back to sleep.
HURRICANE
A thoroughbred hurricane,
just arrived in Cuba from the Bahamas.
Raised in Bermuda
but has family in Barbados.
Has been to Puerto Rico.
Ripped out the mainmast of Jamaica by the roots.
Was going to ravage Guadeloupe.
Did ravage Martinique.
Age: two days.
_________________
Nicolas Guillen
The Great Zoo
translated by Aaron Coleman
The University of Chicago Press, 2024
photograph:
Langston Hughes, Michael Koltyov, Ernest Hemingway, Nicolas Guillen in Madrid, 1937
Saturday, November 29, 2025
OSTAP SLYVYNSKY ~
Amber
Tell me, was it a joke? I have been digging
all night long, just like you told me to;
mice were laughing at me.
I seemed to see, on the other side,
the sun warming the leaves,
children being readied for school,
their white collars straightened,
people checking if the iron was left on,
watering petunias from a tin
watering can.
I could swear I heard
a heart beating through the clay. But was I
teasing this hope for nothing?
For nothing, I shuffled the earth, looking for even
a single bright thread in it?
Explain this to me, while I'm standing
staring at my own open palm.
There—right under my ring finger—
where the handle of a shovel rubbed my skin,
a grain of amber is now growing,
like a lamp, lit for a short while
in some purgatory of my own
with my very own hand.
__________________
Ostap Slyvynsky
Winter King
translated by Vitaly Chernetsky & Iryna Shuvalova
Lost Horse Press, 2023
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