Great Zoo by Nicolás Guillén and translated by Aaron Coleman

This is poetry from Cuba.

Great Zoo by Nicolás Guillén translated by Aaron Coleman is published by University of Chicago Press. This is a Book originally written in Spanish. This was published in 2024.0 and has the ISBN of 9.780226834795E12.

Nicolás Guillén’s Great Zoo, translated by Aaron Coleman, is a Cuban poetry entry with a wonderfully strange premise: the zoo as social, political, and imaginative structure. Guillén is one of Cuba’s major poets, and this book gives English-language readers another angle on his satirical and musical intelligence. A zoo is never only animals. It is display, captivity, classification, spectacle, and the human habit of naming the living world into cages. Coleman’s translation helps bring that bite into present English. Published by the University of Chicago Press, Great Zoo belongs in the library as a work of playful ferocity, where humor and critique move together and the poem becomes an enclosure that knows exactly what it is doing.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.