We tend to assume that political poetry announces its commitment to the here and now. Loynaz leaves us at sea, favoring an elemental vocabulary of rains, winds, rivers, waves, wings, and stars. Her poems ... ride a recursive current. They inspire doubt in the power of forward movement to manifest a new reality.

Dulce María, the gentle ivory-tower woman cut in a light feminine form between the gothic and the overreal...Brief as well as delicate, her tenuous Cuban word that would never allow itself to be cut in half, like paper of fossilized silk...a phosphorescent reality of her own incredibly human poetry, her fresh language, tender, weightless, rich in abandon, in feeling, the mystic irony on the lined paper of her everyday notebook like roses shrouded in the common.

Characterized by a restless fusion of European and Afro-Caribbean influences, Loynaz’s poems evoke the problematic dynamic of self, identity, and a deliberate dissolution...James O’Connor’s English translation, presented en face, is not doggedly literal but instead supports the transformational elements of Loynaz’s work. His approach reinforces the remarkable fluidity of her phrasings, which have a refractive nature, giving rise to multiple potential translations, each with subtle metaphysical shadings…The result is satisfying and triggers self-reflection.

A cosmos of paradoxes, of encounters and failed encounters, of reality made into literature and literature seeped into reality.

That equilibrium between fortitude and tenderness—the strong and the sensible—never denies its feminine cast; just like it was never hidden in the life of Dulce Mariá Loynaz.

If a picture is worth a thousand words a line from Loynaz is worth many times more.

The poems are intensely personal, and yet encompass universal themes: the agonies of love, the pleasures and terrors of solitude, wrestling with the divine. I was reminded, at different times, of Rumi, Emily Dickinson, Leonard Cohen, and Gabriela Mistral; while I often find contemporary prose poems difficult—too obscure, I suppose—these I found to be transporting.

James O'Connor has seemingly seamlessly translated these powerful little prose poems, they gleam and punch...These poems have fought off age, indifference, political scrutiny and sanction, they have fought off time to remain fresh and full of playful magic.

[Absolute Solitude] showcase[s] the poet’s precision and transparency, holding true to her conviction that poetry represents no end point, but rather a journey, a movement... O’Connor beautifully brings the collection into English, rendering Loynaz’s intimacy delicate and strong, her poetic subject bold and emotionally bare.