I stumbled upon Pérez Firmat’s Bilingual Blues, a 1995 book of poems, 10 years after its release. A high school freshman enamored of literature but only beginning to like poetry, I saw myself reflected in his brooding diasporic meditation: The fact that I am writing to you in English already falsifies what I wanted to tell you. My subject: how to explain to you that I don’t belong to English though I belong nowhere else Indeed, I never know what language to use when explaining myself. En...
