Breach of Trust / Abuso De Confianza

The best-known work by acclaimed Cuban poet Ángel Escobar

Ángel Escobar’s Breach of Trust / Abuso de confianza is known by many as the most devastating book of his poetic generation. It is his first to be offered to an English-speaking audience. Merging personal and collective meditations, these twenty-three poems perform an indictment of violence. Escobar’s poetry delineates lacerations etched on bodies and minds by the sanguinary twentieth century, which unfolded out of a longer modernity spanning the Americas.

Breach of Trust / Abuso de confianza outlived its author, who took his own life in 1997. Brief and implicit appeals for justice and love offset the book’s abject theatricality. Escobar’s tragic masterpiece deftly interweaves themes into a striking synthesis offered in the spirit of survival.

Award-winning translator Kristin Dykstra introduces this collection with a comprehensive examination of Escobar’s life, work, and the times within which he wrote. Dykstra situates Escobar’s poetic abjection as his drive to confront thingification face to (non)face.

Ángel Escobar was born in Cuba’s eastern province of Guantánamo in 1957. A student of theater, Escobar moved to Havana in 1977. His work includes the poetry collections Viejas palabras de uso (Old Well-Used Words), Cuéntame lo que me pasa (Tell Me What’s Happening to Me), Cuando salí de La Habana (When I Left Havana), and the theater piece Ya nadie saluda al rey (Now No One Greets the King). His work received the Premio David in 1978 and the Premio Roberto Branly in 1985.

Kristin Dykstra, recipient of the 2012 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship, also translated Reina María Rodríguez’s Other Letters to Milena / Otras cartas a Milena and Juan Carols Flores’s The Counterpunch (and Other Horizontal Poems) / El contragolpe (y otros poemas horizontales), as well as various other books of Cuban poetry.