cage, inside her house, inside her crumbling city. The reality she has created is soon destroyed after the appearance of a Hollywood actor, Gerónimo, who has come to interview her regarding her father, Mauricio Antonio Rodríguez, “el macho”, for a film he is making. Cleo’s whole life and history, as she knows it, is called into question by this investigation of her father’s life, leaving her shaken to the core as she moves through the falsified facts and fictions of her life. Indeed, Revolution Sunday is a dark, disjointed narrative with fragmented episodes and questions with no answers. Cleo moves seamlessly from Havana to Paris, to Mexico City, to Spain, to the United States, to Cannes without explanation of how she managed such trips with the authorities hot on her heels at every turn. As she muses, travels, and enters and exits one tumultuous relationship after another, it becomes apparent that she is a prisoner of her own personal situation as well as the political situation in Cuba. Her narrative and the poetry within it illustrate this imprisonment: “I’m trapped, full of doubts”; “when you’re born in captivity , you have a very precise set of gestures”; and “I’m imprisoned, completely imprisoned .” Throughout the novel, Cleo refers to Havana as home, yet she admits to herself that she needs to hide behind the disguises created by clothing or masks. The falsification of her own identity and the way that she alternates between her love for Cuba (“Cuba looks so small down there, while it’s so big inside me . . .”) and her desire to be free of the constant surveillance is the ultimate betrayal. Cleo is a sad person living a sad life. Nothing she does ever alleviates her sadness and, as she experiences repeated betrayals, she only imprisons herself more securely inside the cage she has created for herself. Revolution Sunday ties the realities of Cuba with the insecurities of her people. To be constantly afraid of what the authorities might do next, coupled with the frequent traveling to free democratic countries across Europe and the Americas, creates a paradoxical situation through which Cleo finds it difficult to navigate. Janet Mary Livesey Norman, Oklahoma Adam Zagajewski Asymmetry Trans. Clare Cavanagh. New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2018. 96 pages. THIS STUNNING NEW VOLUME from Adam Zagajewski deserves to be read by anyone who has wondered how language can describe absence. It is a classic conundrum. And Zagajewski’s humane, welcoming voice is just the one to think through it: he is a poet who eschews an academic tone, refuses to play linguistic games, and declines a podial manner, although he insists that the lyric can bring us above quotidian life even as this life grounds and innervates it. There is a reason Zagajewski has found so many readers—he is open to us. He makes no assumptions about his readership, no exclusions. The volume begins with the poem “Nowhere,” which in turn begins with the poet returning from his father’s funeral . His gaping loss obviously informs the disorientation that spirals through the poem. He feels he is “nowhere,” he belongs “nowhere,” and his pain is itself “nowhere,” which is the key to this paradox. He offers plenty of details that place him in space and time and give him what we call an identity—yet our commonplace belief is that identity is formed through tangible, explicable alliances and experiences. How can such identity account for absence, grief? An American cashier asks the speaker where he is from. She is expecting a statement of belonging, so she—and we—can situate him in a named location. But, he tells us, he had forgotten: “I wanted to tell her / about my father’s death, then thought: I’m too old / to be an orphan.” The socially correct answer, Poland, is not correct for the psychology of one experiencing the vertiginous effect of loss. He is coming from a funeral, from a brief encounter with the land of the dead, from the long land of memory where his father currently lives. This sense of being and belonging nowhere, of orphanhood in many guises, pervades Asymmetry and...