I am letting go of my long aversion to books written in verse - after loving The Weight of the Sky and now having my mind blown by The Poet Slave of Cuba, I really need to accept that I was being an idiot about the whole thing. I can't imagine Juan Francisco Manzano's biography being written in a different form after reading the amazing things that Margarita Engle has done with her book. It is so amazing and so upsetting, it's like nothing I've ever read.

So first, as I've written before, I was raised in Florida but know beans about Cuba. I don't know if things have changed in the schools in the past twenty years but I was there during the big Marielito Boat Lift and we still didn't talk about Cuban history or politics or culture. We never got anything other than the Cuban Missile Crisis and forget about Guantanamo Bay - when I was teaching history in the late 1990s my college students asked how we had a military base on Cuba when we hated them. None of them learned about the Spanish Civil War in school so it was all a mystery.

But we are on the edge of our seats over Brad and Angelina's baby. It's all about the priorities people!

I requested a review copy of Poet Slave of Cuba from Henry Holt because I had never heard of Juan Manzano and I wanted to know more about the island's literary history. What I got was a biography written in a series of poems from not only Juan's perspective but also his parents, the two women who owned him and others who were involved in his life. It has to be one of the most dramatic and disturbing books I have read in ages. The boy - and later man - had a horrific life, a terrible life, but he never stopped seeing poetry all around him, he never stopped writing poetry in his head. Even though he was set free on the death of his first owner, and his freedom was purchased by his mother from his second owner, he had to run away from her (and her insanity) and raise money by selling poems to finally gain public freedom from the second owner. Even then he was later imprisoned and suspected of leading a slave uprising (an uprising that never existed).

He died in poverty, still struggling to survive.

Here is what Engle has to say about his childhood:

She takes me with her wherever she goes
I become the companion of my owner, noble ghost
no, not a companion, remember?
a poodle, her pet
with my curly dark hair
and small child's brown skin
suitable
for the theater
and parties

So I bark
on command
I learn to whine and howl
in verse
I'm known as the smart one who never
forgets
I can listen
then recite
every word

Listen, she says to her friends
and the priest
see how little Juanito can sing
see how I've trained him
watch him
perform

It's an amazing book, absolutely positively amazing and I can't recommend it enough. (Full review to follow later in Bookslut or Eclectica.)