Have You Been Long Enough at Table

How do you write about your background, your family history, or an ocean-wide diaspora, when the most celebrated words about your experiences have already been written, chosen by adversaries speaking for or over you? The Cuban American poet Leslie Sainz poses that question in her debut collection’s latently terrifying title, Have You Been Long Enough at Table, which comes from Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Right before the novella’s protagonist Santiago, a Cuban fisherman, begins his fateful marlin hunt, his death threats turn curiously domestic: “Come up easy and let me put the harpoon into you. All right. Are you ready? Have you been long enough at table?”

Out of literary cliché, officialese, and other languages of disregard and brutality, Sainz creates assemblages of spiky surfaces and eye-catching asymmetries. The list-poem “Conjugate / Demonstrate” looks like an ESL lesson, a fill-in-the-blanks exercise on the irregular verb to be. But Sainz’s existential statements tell a series of quotidian tragedies, a familial saga of dispossession, amnesia, and guilt:

I have been and
You have been disarmed.
She has been outlanded.
He has been eulogized.
They have been so patient.
We have been at fault.

“Climate Feedback,” which courses down the page in a sinusoidal stream, churns and churns the opening sounds of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” turning the American national anthem into a seafarer’s lament: “Say how can you leave with a sea that tall // O say can you leave // Can the sea // That’s all.”

Writing about her own family, Sainz makes autobiography resemble surrealism, and vice versa:

                My        mother   is
the         height       of  six
        stacked           corpses       when
  she is       smuggled
onto a Pan Am flight               to
                    Jamaica.

Gothic, sure—but also the mathematical truth. It’s one example among dozens of Sainz having her poetry both ways, alternating an idiosyncratic squint with an eye for geopolitical change and mercurial family dynamics. She can sound like no one but herself, even as she insists on her own inconsequence:

I know        
the moon does not think me important. The stars could be
showing me their backs, and I couldn’t do a thing about it.