Kyle Carrero Lopez’s electrifying debut collection centers three interconnected forces: social life, US-Cuba relations, and the lives of Black people in the US and Cuba. Through familial, satirical, and geopolitical lenses, Party Line considers how countries-and people-wield power over those they deem Other. The collection features a series meditating on tensions embedded in party spaces. Carrero Lopez challenges assumptions that these spaces are escapist or apolitical, revealing the unexpected ways in which the personal mirrors the political. His work expands bridges between US and Cuban art by developing an urgent poetics around the material conditions of the US embargo and challenging whitewashed images of Cuban Americans in the US imagination. Alternating between humor and lyric severity, playfulness and political critique, these poems negotiate contradiction with linguistic dexterity and critical consciousness, proving that political poetry can be both serious and joyously alive.
