Unlearning the Future
Poet Leslie Sainz Presents Competing Worlds in Award-Winning New Book
By Elizabeth Speed
Before bed, I walked my plank of uncertainties
and plunged further into uncertainty. Am I capturing all of history
in this gesture? I shouted into the future. In the wet air of the future,
I could have but never appeared. No one was sorry but me.
This excerpt appears in the poem “Sonnet for Ochún.”
Leslie Sainz published these lines in her book of poetry Have You Been Long Enough at Table. She’s garnering major industry attention in the form of big awards, including winning the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award, and selection as a finalist for several others, including the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, New England Book Award in Poetry and the Vermont Book Award in Poetry. It’s a notable roundup of commendations for a first collection of poems with deep personal ties.
Leslie’s main speaker slips in and out of autobiographical identities: Cuban, American, feminine, queer, political, familial and more. But Leslie’s speaker has the transcending freedom to imaginatively explore what could have been. Who would she be if she’d grown up in Cuba as opposed to the United States? Would visiting Cuba be going “home”? How would her destiny be different if shaped by different politics?
“Writing this collection felt like an exorcism,” says Leslie, a CMU alumna who earned a bachelor’s degree in professional and creative writing in 2013. “I have inherited a kind of longing for a life that I have not lived, but that I have certain cultural touch points for. My identity has been informed by where I come from and where my family comes from. And I think poetry felt like the most natural genre in which to explore this, because I think fundamentally poetry exists at the intersections of contradictions.”
Leslie describes the new collection, released in late 2023, as a story of transformation. It’s a journey of “careful unlearning” for a woman caught between cultures with a shifting ideology. Growing up in a conservative Cuban-American household, Leslie’s speaker determines who she wants to be while curating beliefs both inherited and rejected from her upbringing.
“Propaganda Ghazal” is inspired by a poster Leslie encountered years ago that says, “America, wake up. Fidel Castro is a threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere.” That big statement prompted her to explore her parents’ politics, to consider how to disentangle from deeply held beliefs and what to do when engrained feelings are challenged with new ideas from outside the culture. It’s just one example of how Have You Been Long Enough at Table questions viewpoints while using poetic forms. The repetition and disconnected couplets of the ghazal form support the complicated feelings and interpersonal violence Leslie wants to explore.
“I think the Cuban American experience is very much rooted in a sense of longing and yearning, and it felt like it wasn't fair for me to yearn after something that in some ways has never felt like mine to begin with,” Leslie says. “My life in the United States is far more privileged than if my parents had stayed on the island and I was born and raised there. This collection probes and interrogates the beliefs they inherited from their parents.”
Emerging Voice in Poetry
Even in regular conversation, Leslie’s word choice is careful, colorful, artistic and effusive.
Her poems share the same characteristics, and a provocative, questioning tone borne of her own experience. Have You Been Long Enough at Table is a continuation of both her poetic style, and recognition for her achievement in writing.
Her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ “Poem-a-Day,” “The Yale Review,” “The Kenyon Review,” “American Poetry Review” and elsewhere. She has received numerous prizes, scholarships and fellowships. She was selected for the 2024-2025 Georgia Poetry Circuit alongside acclaimed poets Shane McCrae and Camonghne Felix, received a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Poetry Fellowship and screens applications for future fellowships.
“I've also worked with the NEA through their National Poetry Out Loud competition,” she says. “It’s been a pleasure and an honor to serve as a national semifinalist judge for three years now. I think it's so important for young people to establish a relationship with poetry.”
In addition to writing poetry, Leslie is a leader in that community. She’s the managing editor of the “New England Review,” a prestigious literary journal that publishes original poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama and works in translation. Her responsibilities focus on the production and promotion of each issue to spotlight excellent new writing.
Leslie made several new professional jumps recently. She moved from the page to the digital airwaves as a guest host on the award-winning podcast, “The Slowdown.” She selected poems for two weeks of daily episodes from June 17-28, 2024, focusing on emerging writers, international writers and works in translation. She’s also transitioned from student to teacher with an adjunct teaching position in the MFA program at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island.
Her poetic profile has been on the rise since her selection as one of CMU’s inaugural Tartans on the Rise in 2022, a recognition for young alumni making an early-career impact in their fields. When she recently returned to CMU for a reading from her new book, it was a circle back to the starting line of her work.
“I cannot say enough about how CMU made my current life possible,” Leslie says. “I think the first time that I ever really encountered different political opinions happened when I stepped foot on campus. That was a big step in establishing my independence and ability to self-determine.
“Studying at CMU — working with mentors like Terrance Hayes, Jim Daniels, and Jerry Costanzo — was the first time that I felt like I could take myself seriously as a writer, and that I was treated seriously as a writer.”
