At Chicago Review: Kristin Dykstra on Juan Carlos Flores (1962-2016)

Kristin Dykstra remembers Cuban poet Juan Carlos Flores (1962-2016) for Chicago Review. "After death the poems hold their ground in an aesthetic awareness of home, one marked with specifics of life in Cuba, where Juan Carlos Flores lived in a public housing community that rose out of the ground in a way that could only have happened in certain decades following the 1959 Revolution," writes Dykstra, who translated The Counterpunch (and Other Horizontal Poems)/El contragolpe (y otros poemas horizontales) (University of Alabama Press, 2016). More:

Flores is remembered as someone who suffered illness throughout his adult life, passing through better and worse periods, a part of his story now magnified due to the manner of his death. Flores had been diagnosed with schizophrenia many years earlier. But, more specifically, in his final months he alternated between his tremendous, characteristic lucidity and powerful hallucinations, which hounded him until he could no longer tolerate his fear. By then he was living in Zone 6 and told his friend and fellow poet, Amaury Pacheco, that his dead brother would come to him in the night and goad him to hang himself.

On the morning of his death, a Wednesday, Flores told a disbelieving neighbor that he was going to pick up some final cigarettes and then would hang himself after his morning smoke. That is exactly what he did.

In recent years Flores had shown poems from the manuscript intended to close his trilogy, Trapiche, to various people. Poet Reina María Rodríguez had hoped for its first publication with her little press, Torre de Letras. But as his symptoms worsened, he withdrew the book. By the time of his death, Flores had broken with his family and caused confusion by describing his invalid mother as already deceased. He distanced himself from all but two friends living nearby.

It now appears that Flores destroyed a great deal of his work, probably over the course of months. He also destroyed copies of his papers that López had collected and left with him in hopes of starting an archive of his work. However, people have expressed determination to recover what they can from the materials Flores gave them in better times, items saved in their own collections.

Read on at Chicago Review.