Have You Been Long Enough At Table & Sweet Movie
About Have You Been Long Enough At Table:
Taking its title from Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, Leslie Sainz's Have You Been Long Enough At Table explores the personal and historical tragedies of the Cuban American experience through a distinctly feminine lens. Formally diverse--including prose poems, American sonnets, and persona poems--with echoes of Spanish throughout, this debut collection critiques power and patriarchy as weaponized by the governments of the United States and the Republic of Cuba. In investigating the realities of displacement and inherited exile, Sainz honors her imagined past, present, and future as a result of the "revolution within the revolution,"—the supposed emancipation of Cuban women.
Through lyric and associative meditations, Sainz anatomizes the unique grief of immigrant daughters, as her speakers discover how family can be a microcosm of the very violence that displaced them. What emerges is a spiritual blueprint for disinheritance, radical self-determination, and the nuanced examinations of myth, ritual, and resistance.
About Sweet Movie:
A National Poetry Series winner selected by Victoria Chang, Sweet Movie confronts romantic and religious masochism to interrogate spiritual, sexual, and moral agency. Mirroring the uncertain, unstable tenor of Dušan Makavejev’s controversial avant-garde film Sweet Movie (1974), the voices in Alisha Dietzman’s Sweet Movie are equal parts docile, feverish, and violent. The acclaimed poet works in conversation with visual art, fashion, film, and TV to create deeply insightful and spacious poems of faith, displacement, and love. Perpetually observant, Sweet Movie guardedly but desperately consumes a world that has become unsettling and uncertain.
Leslie Sainz
Leslie Sainz is the author of the debut poetry collection Have You Been Long Enough at Table. The daughter of Cuban exiles, she is the recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, the Yale Review, New England Review, Kenyon Review, Narrative, and elsewhere. A three-time National Poetry Series finalist, she’s received scholarships, fellowships, and honors from CantoMundo, The Miami Writers Institute, The Adroit Journal, and The Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts at Bucknell University. She received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is the managing editor of the New England Review.
Alisha Dietzman
Alisha Dietzman received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and her PhD in Divinity from the University of St Andrews, supported by a grant from the US-UK Fulbright Commission. Her work has also received support from the Rebecca Swift Foundation and the Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park. In 2021, her chapbook Slow Motion Something For No Reason was the editors’ choice selection for the Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and is forthcoming from Factory Hollow Press. Her poetry has appeared in or will appear in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. Raised between Columbia, South Carolina and Prague, Czech Republic, she now works as a bartender and server in Sacramento, California.