Nothing Out of This World: Cuban Poetry 1952–2000 is an introduction to Cuban poetry in the second half of the twentieth-century. It’s an extraordinary and heady mix, combining African and Spanish influences, realism and surrealism, colloquialism and the baroque, experiment and commitment and the rejection of ‘solipsismo’ in favour of a ‘dialogic poetry’ based on an awareness of others and of society.

Nothing Out of This World represents the work of 36 poets including Luis Lorente, Nancy Morejón, Luis Rogelio Nogueras and Roberto Friol. The oldest poet, Fina García-Marruz, was born in 1923; the youngest, Damaris Calderón, in 1967.

Many of these poets have been closely identified with the Revolution. Miguel Barnet was the Cuban ambassador to UNESCO for many years; Robert Fernández Retamar has been the director of the Casa de las America publishing house since 1965. Others, like Heberto Padilla and Raúl Rivero, have been part of the Cuban diaspora.