Keynote
A debut collection that examines US-Cuba tensions, transnational Black identity, and revolutionary gatherings
Book Title
Party Line
Subtitle
Poems
Cover Image
“Lopez’s deceptively breezy lyrics undercut assumptions about queer, Cuban, and American cultures as his speaker rubs shoulders with intellectuals, artists, and activists amid gossipy chatter and hardcore discourse. . . An urgently timely, eye-opening, and incandescent collection.”—Diego Báez, Booklist (starred review)
Poem Excerpt
I walk up to a party I didn’t pay to attend since I’m on the list. The gays throwing it craft lengthy manifestos on community care and the impermissibility of all“-isms” within the space and charge fifty to eighty at the door. You, too, can cruise utopia nightly for the price of one disposable income. The money you have and the people you know: two ropes. A climb to safety, or a bind round the neck.
—From “Public Policy”
Body
Kyle Carrero Lopez’s electrifying debut collection centers three interconnected forces: social life, US-Cuba relations, and the lives of Black people in the United States and Cuba. Through familial, satirical, and geopolitical lenses, Party Line considers how countries—and people—wield power over those they have othered.
The collection features a series meditating on tensions embedded in party spaces. Carrero Lopez challenges assumptions that these spaces are apolitical or purely escapist, revealing unexpected connections between individuals’ actions and those of the state. 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.
The collection features a series meditating on tensions embedded in party spaces. Carrero Lopez challenges assumptions that these spaces are apolitical or purely escapist, revealing unexpected connections between individuals’ actions and those of the state. 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.
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About the Author
Credit: Voxigma Lo
Praise
“This poetry collection reveals the political and radical positioning of party spaces, challenging preconceived notions of nightlife and social gatherings. It is about queer and trans revolution making through parties, the lives of Black people in the U.S. and Cuba, and familial and geopolitical tensions that seep into everyday life.”—Autostraddle
“Party Line asks, at various points, what rules we need, if any, to keep us safe around each other, to what degree our desires need to be attuned with others’, and how we might extract a fairer world from the ruins of American capitalism.”—Noah Warren, Constant Critic
“In Party Line, Kyle Carrero Lopez brilliantly balances the necessity for beauty and the necessity for sharp, clarifying truth. These poems are electric and fully alive with a radical politic, but also tender, also vibrant with image, also clever and warm.”—Hanif Abdurraqib
“Carrero Lopez’s voice is both electric and haunting, moving through queer nightlife, family history, and Cuban American memory. Attuned to every room’s vibe and every room’s violence, these poems reveal how a body gathers joy and danger in the same breath.”—Jasbir K. Puar
