Ricardo Pau-Llosa was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1954. In 1960 his family fled the communist takeover and arrived in Chicago. In 1968, by way of Tampa, they moved to Miami. His books include Sorting Metaphors, selected by William Stafford for the Anhinga Prize, Bread of the Imagined, and Cuba, the latter also published by the Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry Series. Additionally, he is a noted international authority on Latin American art.

Other poems by Ricardo Pau-Llosa in Verse Daily:
September 2, 2023:   "The Reef Sermon" "Among mountains sowed with seashells..."
July 25, 2021:   "Soon" "A dozen years—one for each tribe..."
January 14, 2019:   "Ghost Orchid" "Haunted by the promise of flowers, light pursues..."
June 20, 2017:   "Needle" "A lost man might pour his jug..."
December 3, 2015:   "Rings" "Distance gels the ghostly into fictions..."
April 7, 2015:   "Money" "The day I need pockets, I will refuse..."
July 1, 2014:   "Give-Us-This-Day Man" "Every morning breakfast became..."
February 11, 2013:   "Bethany Man" "From afar it looks like the bus is stranded..."
July 29, 2011:   "Giant Slayer Man" "Rifling brochures..."
January 27, 2007:   "Semilla" " As with galaxies, with flowers..."

Other poems on the web by Ricardo Pau-Llosa:
"Car Wash, Key Largo"
Two poems
Two poems
Four poems
"View from My Mother's Last Hospital Room"
"Bishop (of air)"
"Squandered Moons"
"Luxury"
"Monstrance Man"
"Priam"
"Flight to L.A."
"Abacus"
"Husserlian Meditation: Sunday Rain"

Ricardo Pau-Llosa's Website.

About Fleeing Actium:

"His most ambitious book to date, Fleeing Actium is Pau-Llosa's summa, the volume that his earlier work has been preparing us for. It gathers and showcases all of the generative modules of his poetry: the ekphrastic, the philosophical, the other-cultural, the musical, the mundane. As well, it reflects Pau-Llosa's continuing exploration of the sonnet form, whose flexibility and expressive reach make for some of the finest moments in the book. Rich, various and challenging, Fleeing Actium further secures Pau-Llosa's position as one of the strongest voices in contemporary American poetry."
—Gustavo Pérez Firmat

"Delighting us with formal dexterity and acuity and with subjects as varied as Husserlian meditations on pragmatic and banal, seemingly superfluous technologies, ekphrasis, back-and-forth monologues between Greek characters and biblical characters, and lost sermons of the Buddha, Ricardo Pau-Llosa shows us a full range of explorations into human experience through, like Husserl, phenomenological, epistemological and ontological lenses. Pau-Llosa is one of the finest poets and thinkers of our age at the height of his talents in Fleeing Actium."
—Adam Vines

"Spinning magical imagery, erudition and blessed accessibility, Ricardo Pau-Llosa's magnum opus, Fleeing Actium, cements the artist's reputation as a poet's poet. Painterly and potent, the collection demonstrates a mastery of lines, meticulous research and seamless control so very, very rarely seen. The poet as Caravaggio, soaring the heights and depths of lighting, the shadows and the dark. Fleeing Actium is verse at its most thoughtful and entertaining. We published Mr. Pau-Llosa more times than any other poet, dead-or-alive. Here he shows why."
—Robert Nazarene