Wise Fish: Tales in 6/8 Time
New York Times Editor's Choice
Gustavus Myers Award Honorable Mention
Judge's citation, Gustavus Myers Book Award:
"Cutting-edge poetry grounded in diasporic discontinuities, and the damage of slavery and cultural disruption."
New York Times Book Review:
"Wise Fish is a serious and seriously enjoyable contribution to our flourishing Latino literature."
Black Issues Book Review:
"In Wise Fish , Castro casts a discussion of African migration and place into the mysteries, practices and spiritual traces that Africans carry from one shore to the other, and between life and death . . . skillfully creat[ing] a world in which language, lore and longing uneasily meet."
MultiCultural Review:
"Castro's Wise Fish: Tales in 6/8 Time is very much about the rhythms of language, the experience of straddling cultures . . . It is also a volume that weaves memory, tradition, history, and hope for the future in an artful, dynamic way. "
Rain Taxi:
"Castro's Wise Fish expands the lexicon (and the function) of what Edouard Glissant has termed "Caribbean Discourse' . . . expanding on what is possible for us to say—and therefore hear, understand, and feel."
Bob Holman:
"From a e to ae aeeeee is how long it takes for a word under slow waves to dissolve to pure sound. This is the domain of Adrian Castro, el poeta salsero, whose Wise Fish is composed solely in Spanglishcubanotainocreole y la lengua del orisha. Castro lays out a groove deep as an ocean trench, and you flow with the go. Use the dorsal fin of the wise fish to comb the language free of snarls, tangles and knots. Now you got it, poetry's music. Open book, hear music."
New York Times Editor's Choice
Gustavus Myers Award Honorable Mention
Judge's citation, Gustavus Myers Book Award:
"Cutting-edge poetry grounded in diasporic discontinuities, and the damage of slavery and cultural disruption."
New York Times Book Review:
"Wise Fish is a serious and seriously enjoyable contribution to our flourishing Latino literature."
Black Issues Book Review:
"In Wise Fish , Castro casts a discussion of African migration and place into the mysteries, practices and spiritual traces that Africans carry from one shore to the other, and between life and death . . . skillfully creat[ing] a world in which language, lore and longing uneasily meet."
MultiCultural Review:
"Castro's Wise Fish: Tales in 6/8 Time is very much about the rhythms of language, the experience of straddling cultures . . . It is also a volume that weaves memory, tradition, history, and hope for the future in an artful, dynamic way. "
Rain Taxi:
"Castro's Wise Fish expands the lexicon (and the function) of what Edouard Glissant has termed "Caribbean Discourse' . . . expanding on what is possible for us to say—and therefore hear, understand, and feel."
Bob Holman:
"From a e to ae aeeeee is how long it takes for a word under slow waves to dissolve to pure sound. This is the domain of Adrian Castro, el poeta salsero, whose Wise Fish is composed solely in Spanglishcubanotainocreole y la lengua del orisha. Castro lays out a groove deep as an ocean trench, and you flow with the go. Use the dorsal fin of the wise fish to comb the language free of snarls, tangles and knots. Now you got it, poetry's music. Open book, hear music."
