Beneath the Spanish

Moving among Puerto Rico, New York, and Morocco, Hernández Cruz (The Mountain in the Sea) records landscapes, languages, and cultures bound by the intermingling and boundary-transcending of mestizaje. Quotidian pleasures—including music, food, and chess—reveal a long global history of exchange. “My mother always made coffee at 3 p.m.,” Hernández Cruz writes, recalling that “she maintained this habit throughout our exile in New York, many years almost thirty.” This traditional Caribbean affair was an occasion for the poet to hear family stories that traced the interplay of the tobacco rituals of “our Taino ancestors” and the coffee bean that “they say comes from Africa.” Hernández Cruz, who sprinkles his English with Spanish, revels in the flavors, sounds, and styles brought about by cultural overlap while also attending to the history of conquest and slavery in which they are forged. He explores each object of focus in the book via twinned compositions—one prose, one poetry. Influenced by jazz, Hernández Cruz uses the prose pieces to introduce his themes and the poems to riff and improvise. Arriving in a historical moment fixated on migration and borders, this book comes as a salve, reminding readers that, when looking for any origin story, “The more you go/ The more you come back.” (Nov.)