From the Creative Editor

Havana, Cuba, is a time capsule: the haunting photographs of Maria Lau explore what survives of the city's once-thriving Chinatown, or Barrio Chino. A Cuban American artist living in New Jersey, Lau returned to Cuba in search of her Cuban Chinese heritage, initiating her much-lauded 71 series from which these photographs are a selection. Another haunting landmark of Havana is the Mercado de Cuatro Caminos, situated between the city's old and new sections and long a sacred site for practitioners of Santería. Eileen Sosin Martínez provides a fascinating look at the history of this market, its importance to the Santería community, and its stubborn survival in the face of Communist policies and the city's physical deterioration. Sosin Martínez also investigates the latest official efforts to restore the market's structural and architectural integrity.

Included in this section are five extraordinary poems in English by Randy Koch, titled collectively Against the Risen Flesh, which the author has described to me as "dramatic monologues, each in the voice of a Spanish conquistador in the moments prior to his or her death." Koch stresses that the poems "are not intended to celebrate or romanticize" the figures or their deeds, "or to force them to confess to their frequent brutality and greed." The poems, in Koch's words, "are meant to bring them to life as human beings and demonstrate how their voices and the events they engaged in 500 years ago continue to echo in the 21st century."

We are pleased to bring you three poems by Francisco dos Santos, the contemporary Brazilian poet, who also is editor of the important avant-garde publishing house Lumme. Each of his poems has a star-like presence on the white page, "small" yet infinite, delicate yet rigorous, precise interlocking lines yet cosmically open and linguistically adventurous.

A significant part of this creative section is devoted to work by Margarita Pintado. A Puerto Rican poet and scholar, Pintado is one of the most ecstatic and passionate lyric poets in contemporary Spanish-language writing, furthering her country's astonishing line of powerful female poets, which includes Julia de Burgos, Marigloria Palma, and Clara Lair. We are honored to bring readers five of Margarita Pintado's wonderful poems. As a literary scholar, Pintado wrote her doctoral dissertation on the Cuban poet and novelist Lorenzo García Vega, the youngest member of the legendary Orígenes group in pre-Revolutionary Cuba. García Vega continued his groundbreaking work in an oft en bitt er and isolated US exile. Meeting him in Miami some months before his death, Pintado collaborated with him on a daring twenty-first-century literary adventure, a joyous "blog novel," Ping-Pong Zuihitsu, from which we are proud to offer a generous extract—thanks to the poet and executor of García Vega's estate, José Kozer, who granted permission to publish this selection. Of all the Orígenes writers, García Vega is possibly the only one to fully transcend the movement's neobaroque aesthetic and live long enough to experiment with contemporary online technology. Some of the blog entries of Ping-Pong Zuihitsu came to us with illustrations by the Argentine artist Rosana Fernández. When we saw them, we were enchanted and wanted to see more; we are pleased to publish here an expanded selection of the artist's fascinating Espacios atópicos.

The emerging Cuban American poet Michelle Lizet Flores contributes "15 Ways of Looking at a Latina," which not only recalls Wallace Stevens's famous Cubist contemplation of a blackbird from multiple perspectives but employs anaphora in a devastating manner, relentlessly listing the various stereotypes and insults to which the Latinx female is subjected, with the poem's last line subverting expectations and asserting the complexity of Latinx identity, which cannot be confined to skin tone. Flores's powerful first book, Cuentos from the Swamp, is available from Finishing Line Press.

Sara Márquez Durst, a young Peruvian American writer, provides this issue's fiction with her short story, "Katy Kola." Márquez Durst writes with unsparing economy and focus as she...