The Winter Garden Photograph

Reina María Rodríguez

A meditation on the power and limitations of images, The Winter Garden Photograph began as an homage to a magazine, The Courier, published by UNESCO. Reina María Rodríguez used the magazine’s photographs of faraway places to spark an investigation of the mental landscapes comprising her own, contemporary Havana. I think through / the breath in you; I think through / the blood in you: precisely in striving to inhabit other worlds, she pursues the self. With the original Cuban edition of this book, Rodríguez won her second Casa de las Américas Prize for Poetry.

This edition includes a set of co-translations by Dykstra and Nancy Gates Madsen, and an interview with Rodríguez, conducted by Rosa Alcalá.