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As a poet and writer, Sullivan knows that life is not lived as theory but as practice, that we exist on earth not as ideas but as living creatures, and that you can understand nothing about a place without listening to individual people and their stories. She has concerned herself with intense particulars.

Margaret Atwood, from the Introduction.
Cuba Grace Under Pressure

with photographer Malcolm David Batty. McArthur Publishers, 2003.

Read the Preface

Critical Praise for CUBA: Grace Under Pressure

“As a poet and writer, [Sullivan] knows that life is not lived as theory but as practice, that we exist on earth not as ideas but as living creatures, and that you can understand nothing about a place without listening to individual people and their stories. She has concerned herself with intense particulars.”
—Margaret Atwood, from the Introduction.

In Cuba: Grace Under Pressure, a work combining transcendent black-and-white photographs with luminous affecting prose, Cuba is a country where resistance against oppression—of all sorts—is conducted via elegant dreams, sinuous art, and insistent sumptuous humanity…[The book] is a glimpse of a nation—the oldest, landed culture in the Americas—where dreams of freedom are fleshed out in music, art, and in enviable community. This book is a gallery of life.”
—George Elliott Clarke, The Halifax Chronicle

“[Sullivan] asks all the right questions and is as honest with us as [Cubans] are with her. She gives us much of herself and, by sharing her own observations, questions and moments of surprise, she makes these stories accessible…. what a privilege to travel with them.”
—Francisca Zentili, The Globe and Mail

“This is not a political book. It is written as though the nation of Cuba sat down for a portrait….”
—Buzzflash