The Star-Spangled Brand (PREORDER NOW)
The Star-Spangled Brand by Marcelo Morales, translated by Kristin Dykstra, is a collection of prose poetry which tracks a city that changes–unless it does not. He began the book's composition during the 2010s with a long poem, "The Swan II," reflecting on everyday life and history in Havana. At the time, the world viewed Cuba as undergoing profound transformation. The end of this decade involved more large-scale shifts and conflicts, many driven by north/south relations. How would new events sculpt spaces around the love, fear, and needs of one single citizen?
PRAISE FOR THE STAR-SPANGLED BRAND
Marcelo Morales is a Chris Marker of Cuba. His groundbreaking prose poetry unfolds like film, from his double nation-state consciousness—Cuba and the US. It is saturated with fast-paced montage of snap-shot historical memory and the reality of economic-embargoed utopia. His “two nation-states” vision across the ocean plays the role of a foreigner in Florida, documenting and translating the paradise of gun violence and xenophobia. The Star-Spangled Brand in Kristin Dykstra’s brilliant translation is unforgettable and vital. It will make you feel what Morales feels: “the power of two nation-states on the back of my neck.”
—Don Mee Choi, author of Mirror Nation
The poetry of Marcelo Morales is a revelation. Through the eyes and words of a rare talent, the poems in The Star-Spangled Brand illuminate the complexities of being Cuban. Kristin Dykstra’s stunning translations in this bilingual edition provide readers access to Morales’s singular lyric weave of classic, modern, and postmodern literary allusions with the languages of everyday Cuban life inside and outside of Cuba. The collection charts a poetic journey through the relationship between Cuba and the United States—the “two nation-states on the back of my neck,” in Morales’s words—and interactions between their ordinary citizens. This journey includes President Barack Obama's historic March 2016 visit and the Trump administration’s November 2017 reversal of policies, events whose backdrop is the island’s serial economic crises beginning with the post-1989 “Special Period” into the global pandemic of the 2020s. In this book, the poetic speaker’s initial identity as a Havana driver and guide during a period of US tourist influx—a role once held by Morales himself—marks the speaker’s personal, political, geographic, and learning journey, which in the collection encompasses Havana, Florida, Vermont, and Uruguay. This trajectory that begins in a car evokes not only classical travel narratives but also the twentieth and twentieth-first century trope of the road movie, a genre that thrived in Cuba from the 1990s into the 2010s in film and narrative fiction. In The Star-Spangled Brand, the interior facet of this quest assumes a labyrinthian quality, as Dykstra brilliantly traces in her essay accompanying the poems. Through this journey, Morales’s poetic speaker navigates his own shifting views of the US and his changing relationship to the English language. Readers are in for a rich verbal feast as two gifted creators—poet Marcelo Morales and translator Kristin Dykstra—come together in these pages.
-Vicky Unruh, co-editor, with Jacqueline Loss, of The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature
ABOUT THE POET
Marcelo Morales (b. Cuba) began to write at the end of the “Special Period,” a euphemistic phrase referring to a time of economic, political, and social crisis in Cuba resulting from the collapse of the socialist field. In his poetry, Morales sifts through historical, political, economic, and material conditions that shape human experience. El mecanismo mudo, his extended collection of new prose poetry of which The Star-Spangled Brand is one segment, is forthcoming from Varasek Ediciones in Madrid. Morales is also the author of The World as Presence / El mundo como ser, a bilingual poetry edition from the U. of Alabama Press (2016, longlisted for the National Translation Award). His previous books of prose poetry include El círculo mágico, El mundo como objeto, Cinema, and Materia, among others; his novel, La espiral, appeared in 2006. He lives in Havana. BOMB published a 2017 interview in which Morales discusses writing, as well as his own photographs (https://bombmagazine.org/articles/marcelo-morales/).
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR:
Kristin Dykstra is a writer, literary translator, and scholar. She is the author of the prose poetry collection, Dissonance, winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize (The University of Chicago Press, 2025). Veliz Books published her translation of Amanda Berenguer’s collection, The Lady of Elche, in 2023. Dykstra is principal translator of The Winter Garden Photograph by Reina María Rodríguez, winner of the 2020 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and finalist for the National Translation Award. Her translation of 13 lunas 13, by Tina Escaja, won a Gold Medal from the International Latino Book Awards program (2023). She held a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literary Translation for her translation of Rodríguez’s Catch and Release included within the bilingual edition, Jigs and Lures, from Alliteration Publishing.
