In Their Own Words
Rena J. Mosteirin on “Disaster Tourism”
Disaster Tourism
Florida is a great place to lie.
The sun never sets. We don’t have funerals.
You only ever know your friend passed
when you see his furniture at
the second hand store. You tell people,
I think he went back to Boston.
He wanted to be closer to the grandkids.
I accidentally found the place on the beach
where the attractive young people are.
I don’t fit. These things are not democratic.
Beauty is basically fascism, in that
it’s all about control. You can spoil yourself
so easily if you lose your grip.
This is how I will remember Naples, Florida
the Christmas after the hurricane.
The fishdock is a line of broken teeth.
The water is not safe for swimming.
Storm debris shimmers like souvenirs.
The red tide is a Christmas thing, he says.
The house is split and half slants down.
Just a few inches. Enough to show
that the foundation is unstable.
The ocean pushed up the concrete here.
You see that? It seemed so permanent.
This one is gutted. Oldest house on the beach.
Sold for the land on the condition that the new owner
tear down this dump. It’s been condemned by the city.
When the water came, we swam.
Dolphins shopped on 5th Avenue.
All the storefronts are just facades.
This is where we go to play at being rich.
Tell me the part that’s going to be the most expensive to fix.
Reprinted from Disaster Tourism (BOA Editions, 2025) with the permission of the author. All rights reserved.
On “Disaster Tourism”
This poem is the title poem in my book Disaster Tourism. More than anything else, to me, this is a book about survival, and I wanted the titular poem to be really clear, to set the stakes. I open the poem with the line “Florida is a great place to lie,” and go on to suggest that deaths in Florida are covered up, as the people who live there are constantly cycling through periods of devastation followed by periods of rebuilding. I see lying, an essentially creative act, as part of that process. This is a poem full of lies. The penultimate stanza shifts from lies to magical realism: “When the water came, we swam./ Dolphins shopped on 5th Avenue.”
In this poem, I’m a tourist in Naples, Florida, the place my Cuban father now calls home, surveying the damage left by Hurricane Ian. We talked directly about the financial costs of the storm while talking around the emotional impacts, the fear. The spectacle of storm damage so easily became the focal point of what was supposed to be a day at the beach. It’s about ninety miles from Florida to Cuba, and Florida is home to a large transnational community of Cubans. Storms that hit Cuba are very likely to hit Florida as well. This feels like an intimate connection between Florida and Cuba.
New Hampshire is my home, so when I arrive in Florida, the dense, hot air really hits me and I continue to stay aware of it. I was aware of it when I wrote this poem, and the stanzas reflect that. They are uneven and thick. They sit rather heavily on the page. This is because I’m not fluent in Florida’s rhythms.
I wrote this poem under the influence of Ange Mlinko’s dreamlike Florida-Italy book Venice. I’ve long been a fan of Mlinko and her sonic, silky poems. I love teaching her work to my graduate students at Dartmouth and seeing how she opens up their notions of poetry. Florida has many towns named for places in Italy—Naples is one such place—and the names connecting these two places becomes part of the frame for Mlinko’s brilliant book.
After a disaster everyone who is still alive has a story. That’s part of the power a disaster projects. It’s how disasters endure. I don’t think I could fully see the shape of Disaster Tourism until I wrote this poem. Once I had the right frame, I understood the shape of the book, and the work sang to me.
