Orlando Ricardo Menes

Memoria

In Memoria, Menes offers powerful yet also nuanced coming-of-age poems that interrogate maleness in Cuban-American culture and probe the complexities of a Spanish heritage, as well as poems that evoke past relationships, the cultural vibrancy of food, and his own upbringing in the Catholic faith. Interspersed among locations of immigration, from Miami to Madrid, many poems explore vivid memories of how music in the 1970s, including the songs of Lou Reed and Alice Cooper, became anthems for a young man's transformation into adulthood.

Selected Works

Poetry

The Gospel of Wildflowers and Weeds

"The poems of Orlando Ricardo Menes's The Gospel of Wildflowers and Weeds read like the intoxicatingly vivid scenes and portraits one finds in books of illumination. With every keenly extravagant brushstroke, with every turn, one enters a new vantage, a new vista, a new and extraordinarily imagined window—even in our belated, fractious, yet desultory moment—to what was once called the sacred."—Daniel Tobin, author of Blood Labors

Memoria

"Memoria carries us from Miami to Madrid, to "where every road and every life begins and ends," exploring feelings of exile and definitions of being a man (macho) imposed by family, religion, and culture. Castro, Franco, Lou Reed, and other figures become a whetstone for the narrator's burgeoning self. Delivering an impressive array of sonnets, odes, elegies, prose poems, and more, Menes unpacks the relationship between memory and its kin: identity. Memoria is a tour-de-force of form and feeling."

—Shara McCallum

Heresies

“Menes’s poems bring to light patterns of personal and spiritual corruption and the power relations between insiders and outsiders on which economic, social, and religious systems are based.”

—Cincinnati Review

“Heresies hordes detail, combining fact and fiction, and lets symbols accumulate as they do in a culture. It weaves bodily and religious imagery, arousing readers to examine their own beliefs. . . . An intense and masterful undertaking that requires careful dissection.”

—Prairie Schooner

Fetish

" ...Menes's profound references not only convey local color but also bring the essence of his family history eye level with the reader in these striking verses."

—World Literature Today

Furia

"Menes . . . transforms [experiences], giving readers not just a taste of his anguish but a deeper understanding."

—Library Journal

Rumba atop the Stones

"There is lush music to Menes's first book, and this lushness may arise from his subject, namely the Caribbean islands, particularly Cuba, his parents' homeland. He writes of its populace - the dock worker, the sugar cane worker, the worker slaving at all trades - and the loveliness of the island's ecosystems, along with its religions. These are bewitching poems with beguiling vocabulary - kanawa, Wewee, Ochún, mayito, iyá, Yobu. In these words alone, we have the mystery of poetry."

—Gary Soto, Ploughshares

"Orlando Ricardo Menes is not only a compelling poet, he's a storyteller, telling his stories in the first person or in a charged and compressed narrative. The poet touches all bases - magic realism, humor, irony, horror, mystery, mysticism - laced with references to tropical flora, fauna, history, and the melding of African and European religious mythologies."
—The Caribbean Writer

Borderlands with Angels

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