Rito Ramón Aroche was born in Havana in 1961. Las fundaciones (poetry) won the 2006 Gaceta de Cuba prize. Other recent collections include Del rio que durando se destruye (Letras Cubanas, 2005), El libro de los colegios reales (Ediciones Extramuros, 2005), and Andamios (Ediciones Unión, 2005). Read More Aroche is of the *Šñ80s poetry generation in Cuba: writers raised entirely under the institutions of the revolutionary government yet notably diverse in outlook. His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies on and off the island. These poems are new translations from his latest manuscript, Límites de Alcanía, an experiment in the "disarticulation" of voices. Though disrupted, each poem-fragment shares something of its character with the book as a whole, in which a writer explores his relationships with a femme fatale known only as "T." Together they move through a mysterious environment: rotten, healing, deconstructed, barren, and theatrical as a planetarium. The images suggest meditations on Havana's present condition as a "city in ruins" and the uncertain direction in which its society is (or isn't) moving, with whatever "transitions" lie in Cuba's future. The unidentified Romanian poet mentioned in this segment is Ion Barbu, and a translation of his words runs thus: "To the sapient sun I go worshiping/ for, in my chest, my spirit is a well." The initials "A.P." cue lines from "Un sueño donde el silencio es oro," by Argentine writer Alejandra Pizarnik.