Party Line: Poems

A debut collection that examines US-Cuba tensions, transnational Black identity, and revolutionary gatherings

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.