“A haunting love letter to New York . . . Vivifies the cityscape over many decades with tales of love, death, and exile . . . Rich and accomplished . . . Medina has a keen eye for the ebb and flow of desire. . . . There is beauty, suffused with a muted melancholy, in Medina’s attempt to capture the rhythms of life.”— Publishers Weekly. Poet and novelist Pablo Medina’s Cubop City Blues fuses raw, passionate language and elegant lyricism to breathe life into a musically disguised New York City, shaped by jazz masters, refugees, and storytellers. Moulded in the cadence and harmony of Afro-Cuban jazz, this book is a symphonic portrait of a bustling urban landscape and the intimate lives and stories that give a city its voice. Owes as much to music as to any literary form, unified less by plot or characters than by the buoyant yet wistful mood and recurring motifs: - The New York Times Book Review