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Orlando Ferrand is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist, writer, and poet, born in Santiago de Cuba in 1967. He emigrated to the U.S., his claimed homeland, in 1992, after a "life-changing experience" while touring through the Caribbean, Mexico, the Canary Islands and Europe as an actor, theater director and playwright.
With over 30 years of sustained professional practice in the Arts and Letters, Orlando Ferrand has received numerous scholarships and awards in the U.S. He is the recipient of the 2011 Artist Summer Institute by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and Creative Capital's Professional Development Program, the Artist-in-Residency at Princeton University while writing, designing, and directing his opera "Still Life with Daniel, the Lonely Mutant", the Gold medal in the Poetry/Music category for "Citywalker" (PublishAmerica, 2010) in the Readers Favorite International Book Review and Award Contest 2011, and the Linden Lane Poetry Prize 2011 for "The Other Island" ("La otra isla", Spanish Edition, LLP 2011).
"Apologia: Cuban Childhood in My Backpack" (PublishAmerica, 2011), the author's memoir about his childhood and adolescence in Cuba, was recently selected as the Book-of-the-Semester for the Spring Term 2012, at Hostos Community College, City University of New York.
Orlando Ferrand is a member of the National Association of Latino Arts & Culture. He is working on two new titles. He lives in New York City with his partner, and his Doberman Sookie.
Reviewed by Bernadette Acocella for Readers' Favorite
Orlando Ferrand's collection "Citywalker" is full of poems about his Cuban heritage, religion, the search for identity and the loneliness he encounters in New York City. The city is almost a character in this book, a backdrop for all the important encounters that stir up so much emotion for the poet. In this collection the reader watches the poet go through a spectrum of emotions while dealing with his family, his lovers, and himself. The theme of home and homeless occurs over and over, though early on in the collection, in the poem "Family Landscape," the poet decides that "Home does not remain the same." Throughout the book Ferrand uses religious imagery in unique ways, such as in the poem "Space" and "Do you believe in love?" The poem "Song for a romantic season in white" contains one of the most beautiful loneliness images I've encountered recently: "that colorless insect/killing us all."
In one of my favorite poems, "September 11," Ferrand writes the word "falling" down the page and writes each letter twice. This was a beautiful visual representation of the Twin Towers, and was also reminiscent of something e.e. cummings might do. The poem describes a very human reaction to the tragedy and the final stanza of the poem sums up how many New Yorkers felt that day: "Today, I am New York/ I walk downtown/ Gazing at Ground Zero/ Surrounding the incomplete horizon/ Of my own geography." I believe many people in and around New York felt this very same way that day.
There were many beautiful poems in this collection that I could understand and relate to. Ferrand is clearly a poet unafraid to share his journey around New York and toward himself with readers, and the result is often beautiful. Overall this book was very moving and a pleasure to read. At times some of the imagery was a bit too opaque for me, but the emotion behind even Ferrand's most nebulous lines was clear. Finally, as someone who owns and reads many poetry books, I do feel that the book would benefit from a table of contents, so that readers could find their way to favorite poems more easily.
