POET and OPINION COLUMNIST               Select here to listen to Bessy read two poems

BESSY REYNA

She Remembers “The poems in Bessy Reyna’s She Remembers are easy to access  but hard to forget. And to hear her perform her work is to be first transported, then transformed.” Wally Lamb The Battlefield of Your Body “Like Panama, the country of her childhood, Bessy Reyna’s poems provide a channel, a way to bridge east and west by reconciling the warring needs of the body, the mind and the heart.  Whether Reyna is dancing with a stalk of sugar cane in Hartford, Connecticut, or in her birthplace of Cuba, poem after poem is as lively as a salsa. Like chewing sugar cane, her poems ultimately reward with their hard-won sweetness, with the taste that leaves us wanting more.” Vivian Shipley