This month, the University of Notre Dame Press is pleased to publish The Rivers Are Inside Our Homes
by Victoria María Castells. In celebration, we are giving away a limited number of copies! Enter to win by filling out the form at the bottom of this post. This offer expires August 31st and is open to U.S. residents only.
Can’t wait to start reading? Reviewers, bookstore employees, librarians, and other members of the book industry can request a galley through Edelweiss. We encourage you to leave a review if you enjoyed the book.
“Ghosts flow through the gulf stream waters of Victoria María Castell’s gorgeous poems. Caught in the storms of geopolitics, the natural world, and intergenerational memory, this lyric narrative of a Cuban-American family contemplates the complexity of exile and home. Readers of this book will be long haunted by its beauty.”
—Amy Fleury, author of Sympathetic Magic
These incandescent poems by Cuban American poet Victoria María Castells explore how we can salvage our notion of paradise in an overspent Eden. In thwarted homes located in Havana and Miami, Rapunzel and her prince, persecuted nymphs, Morgause, and Bluebeard’s wife speak to us directly, all in need of returning to safety. Confronting machismo, illness, heartbreak, and isolation, the poems depict how women are at the mercy of men, either husband or oligarch. Yet all generations of Cubans are bombarded with this need to return or to leave, to have both, to have neither. From the colonial desecrations to fraught revolutionary aftermath, the search for home is lyrically charted by this contradictory land of suffering and dreams. Through these poems, dictators, grandmothers, mythical characters, and buccaneers are given voices of equal strength, challenging what constitutes truth under a prism of fantasy and desire.
Victoria María Castells is a creative writing teacher in Miami, Florida. Her poems have appeared in Reservoir, The Journal, Quarter After Eight, Notre Dame Review, and other literary journals.
“These are mature and mesmeric poems. Hurricanes, exiled family, the devastating migrations to a new country and landscape, it’s all here and so visceral and so well orchestrated. Each poem works an indelible impact on the reader. This book is a necessary catharsis for all of us who’ve lived and survived this history. A brilliant addition to our literary canon.”
—Virgil Suárez, author of The Painted Bunting’s Last Molt