Self-Portrait as the "i" in Florida

P. Scott Cunningham is a poet and essayist from Boca Raton. His debut collection, Ya Te Veo (University of Arkansas, 2018), was selected by Billy Collins for the Miller Williams Poetry Series. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in The Nation, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and others. He is the editor of Eight Miami Poets (Jai Alai, 2014), a mini-anthology of Miami poets, and Ballerz 2K20 (O, Miami, 2021), a zine of basketball poems, as well as the creator and series editor of The Miami Trilogy, three anthologies of Miami writers that address issues critical to their communities. He is a graduate of Wesleyan University and the founder of O, Miami, a nonprofit dedicated to amplifying the poetry of Miamians. He lives with his children and his wife, the writer Christina Frigo, in Illinois.

“What we understand of Florida, adduced by popular culture, tourist visits to theme parks, social media memes, lacks in comparison to the intimate and gorgeous portrayal of The Sunshine State as inescapable muse in Self-Portrait as the ‘i’ in Florida. Its yard sprinklers, roadside stands, billboards, laundromats, furniture stores, bars, and bays become magic fodder like glittering sparks of sun off its long coast. Yet, Cunningham’s sense of whimsy, delight, and literariness never overpower poignant acknowledgement of Florida’s melancholic edges; such aesthetic balancing is delicate yet perforce its own expeditions of language and image-making: ‘Ashes fall around me like pieces of the moon’ and ‘Flip me, un-season me, soak me / in your broken bottles / your spilled colognes.’ In this poets’ eyes, beauty and kitsch are gloved hand in hand. What is spun from here is the humid, placid calm that follows afternoon storms, poems about soft rock mixes, yachts, and other curiosities that stretch us to feel this poet's uncompromising sense of place. Somehow Cunningham sustains a sly humor throughout, and his pitched lyricism and narrative acts arrive in waves. To our enrichment, Florida is praised, moved inside us, placed in our cultural imagination more vividly.” —Major Jackson, author of Razzle Dazzle"What's remarkable about P. Scott Cunningham's Self-Portrait as the "i" in Florida is—well, actually, the whole thing is pretty remarkable. But what will stay with me, and what fills me with the desire to buy copies of this book to wallpaper the homes of every CEO and politician and also everyone I love or have ever loved or might some day love, is Cunningham's prodigious sense of scope and stakes. This is a book of love poems to specific—often named—beloveds: a wife, three young children, the moon, Miami. But it's also a book about the agony of desperately loving a world past the precipice of irreversible ecological collapse, the pulverizing reality of not being able to give your children a healthier planet, a safer world. Humor isn't a deflection here. As with all poetry's great wits—Parker, O'Hara, Ritvo—it is because Cunningham makes us laugh that he can also make us weep. Florida is so deftly choreographed, so formally various and deliciously propulsive, that I read it in one happy blink, then immediately spent a weekend poring over it slowly, with frankly obscene relish and awe. I sit at its feet." —Kaveh Akbar, author of Pilgrim Bell“The vivid hum of mosquitoes, I-95 traffic, and lawn sprinklers pulses through the pages of P. Scott Cunningham’s extraordinary Self-Portrait as the 'i' in Florida, punctuating landscapes of ocean sunsets and strip malls, mango trees and sinkholes, yachts and encroaching tides. ‘To love this state you have to divest yourself from tomorrow,’ writes Cunningham, and this book is not only an ode to the Sunshine State, with all its precarity and complications, but also to the joys and demands of the domestic. Full of humor and heart, and rooted in the material world, Cunningham’s exuberant, deftly crafted poems bless his subjects with a spiritual and emotional radiance that reminds us, even among the ruins of late-stage capitalism and climate change, we are ‘still holding / one another, still lost in the reverie / of being.’”—Erika Meitner, author of Useful Junk