Points of Balance

Cuban-born New York poet Pablo Medina's bilingual fulcros are six-line poems that, as he writes, "combine the dialectic of the sonnet with the imagistic power of the haiku... shaping language and silence into a point of balance floating in the ocean of time." These short poems, which are not translations of each other, draw us into an intellectual condition: Spanish and English, visual and theoretical, intimate and abstract, where "the thrush sings in the know-it-all woods."