Have You Been Long Enough at Table is both a question and an invitation in Leslie Sainz's marvelous debut. Sainz probes spirituality with the verve and vitality of Emily Dickinson if Dickinson had been born Cuban American at the end of the last century. Sainz probes the overlap of imagination and experience like Sylvia Plath if Plath was born to a Cuban American landscape between "field crickets, memory, lesser parasites" and "the stain of guava on a plastic cutting board." Have You Been Long Enough at Table articulates the bonds and tensions of independence and tradition, spirit and form, home and exile. The narratives ring with the integrity of memoir and the inventiveness of allegory. Nature, politics, and humor overlap in an image where "The Black Wasps wear green berets." Story is transformed into spell, chant, beat: "Mothers, wives, sisters, daughters radiating as verbs under a mahogany roof." These lyrics of "the land--much in us still" are classic and altogether new.

Leslie Sainz is a poet who has been long at the table reading and writing poems and long at the table listening to the poetry of culture and family. She makes questions invitations and memory visible. Come bear witness to a remarkable poet bearing witness.--Terrance Hayes.