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A debut collection that examines US-Cuba tensions, transnational Black identity, and revolutionary gatherings
Kyle Carrero Lopez's electrifying debut collection centers three interconnected forces: social life, US-Cuba relations, and the lives of Black people in the United States and Cuba. Through familial, satirical, and geopolitical lenses, Party Line considers how countries—and people—wield power over those they have othered.
The collection features a series meditating on tensions embedded in party spaces. Carrero Lopez challenges assumptions that these spaces are apolitical or purely escapist, revealing unexpected connections between individuals' actions and those of the state. His work expands bridges between US and Cuban art by developing an urgent poetics around the material conditions of the US embargo and challenging whitewashed images of Cuban Americans in the US imagination.
Alternating between humor and lyric severity, playfulness and political critique, these poems negotiate contradiction with linguistic dexterity and critical consciousness, proving that political poetry can be both serious and joyously alive.
A debut collection that examines US-Cuba tensions, transnational Black identity, and revolutionary gatherings
Kyle Carrero Lopez's electrifying debut collection centers three interconnected forces: social life, US-Cuba relations, and the lives of Black people in the United States and Cuba. Through familial, satirical, and geopolitical lenses, Party Line considers how countries—and people—wield power over those they have othered.
The collection features a series meditating on tensions embedded in party spaces. Carrero Lopez challenges assumptions that these spaces are apolitical or purely escapist, revealing unexpected connections between individuals' actions and those of the state. His work expands bridges between US and Cuban art by developing an urgent poetics around the material conditions of the US embargo and challenging whitewashed images of Cuban Americans in the US imagination.
Alternating between humor and lyric severity, playfulness and political critique, these poems negotiate contradiction with linguistic dexterity and critical consciousness, proving that political poetry can be both serious and joyously alive.
A debut collection that examines US-Cuba tensions, transnational Black identity, and revolutionary gatherings
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Reviews
"Party Line is a piercing study of the spaces where pleasure, performance, and politics collide. Carrero Lopez's voice is both electric and haunting, moving through queer nightlife, family history, and Cuban American memory. Attuned to every room's vibe and every room's violence, these poems reveal how a body gathers joy and danger in the same breath."
Jasbir K. Puar, author of The Right to Maim and Terrorist Assemblages
"If poetry is a dance the poet choreographs, what kind of dance is Kyle Carrero Lopez's Party Line? It's a call-and-response at a basement party where we 'know who to haunt and do it well / dressed in maggot-drenched couture.' It's a masterful choreography of form and feeling: Willi Ninja meets Essex Hemphill; Martha Graham meets Natasha Trethewey. It's the dance track your father plays DJing the party. It's the parts and the parting in the party line. Party Line is a brilliant dance."
Terrance Hayes, author of So to Speak