Carolina Hospital
CAROLINA HOSPITAL is a poet, essayist, and author, writer of several books, including the poetry collections, How to Get into Trouble (Anhinga Press) and Myth America (Anhinga Press), both collaborations with Maureen Seaton, Holly Iglesias, and Nicole Hospital-Medina, as well as the solo collections Key West Nights and Other Aftershocks (Anhinga Press), and The Child of Exile: a Poetry Memoir (Arte Público Press); the novel A Little Love, under the pen name C. C. Medina (Warner Books); and No Excuses! A Brief Survival Guide to Freshman Composition (Sonoran Desert Books). She edited Los Atrevidos: Cuban American Writers (Linden Lane Press) and A Century of Cuban Writers in Florida (Pineapple Press). She also co-translated the poetry collection by Tania Díaz Castro, Everyone will Have to Listen (Linden Lane Press), and participated with 13 South Florida authors in the New York Times’ best-selling novel Naked Came the Manatee (G. P. Putnam's Sons). Her work has appeared in numerous national publications, such as the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature; Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Occupy the Workplace; Bedford/St. Martin’s Florida Literature, and Longman’s Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing.
Key West Nights and Other Aftershocks
March 2019
Carolina Hospital’s newest work entrances the reader with a lyrical exploration of love and loss, danger and beauty, memory and oblivion. Key West Nights and Other Aftershocks is the work of a mature artist, sure of her voice, grounded in the mysteries of the tropics and its many languages. Seldom do we witness what is found here, such as the well-tested tenderness of a long marriage (“the valley that is his life and mine”), or the insistent confidence (“Listen/Listen/Oyeme”) in the perspective of what Gustavo Pérez-Firmat calls “life on the hyphen.” Muriel Rukeyser claimed that, were a woman to tell the truth about her life, “the world would split open.” Key West Night and Other Aftershocks is evidence of that, manifesting the reverberations of such a powerful opening.
— Holly Iglesias (author of Sleeping Things, Press 53, 2018)
If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?