Security Questions

“It was through writing this book,” Osdany Morales says, “that I realized I carried many memories in literary form—that exile had established a past I could already recount without waiting for old age. Exile and poetry made me look not exactly backward, but inward.” The poems from Security Questions (originally published as El pasado es un pueblo solitario) are, on the one hand, a lyric sequence shaped by the poet’s coming of age in small-town Cuba during the late stages of Fidel Castro’s regime, and on the other a testament of exile and immigration, traces that remain in the wake of forsaking a homeland for the uncertainties of a new place. Each poem in this playful and trenchant collection unfolds as a reply to its title, and each title is a question in English that echoes actual online prompts for newly arrived immigrants to establish official identity and security in the United States. With a mix of humor, irony, and sincerity vividly captured by the translator Harry Bauld, Morales transforms these absurd and interrogative bureaucratic authentication questions into the radiant poetry of a new “American” persona.