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What does it mean to dwell in a place? These adventurous poems go on foot in search of answers. Walking the cities, coasts, forests and mountains of Northern California and New England, they immerse themselves in the specifics of bioregion and microclimate, and take special note of the cycle of death and rebirth that plays out dramatically in California's chaparral and grasslands. Inspired by Transcendentalism, Companion Grasses sees the sacred in the workings of the material world, but its indebtedness to the ecological tradition of California poets like Gary Snyder and Brenda Hillman means that it also unearths such evidence in the sensual materiality of words themselves. Both ecologically rich landscapes and highly rhythmic inscapes, these poems set seasonal and human dramas side-by-side, wresting an original, signature music from the meeting of site and sight. In pursuing an aesthetics situated in place, they compose an ethics of what it means to be a human companion to the natural world: "What we love, how we care for it, /is where we live."
A debut poetry collection that meditates on imagination and existence
Experimental and visual poems diving into the history and culture of the poet's homeland, Guam. This book is the fifth collection in Craig Santos Perez's ongoing from unincorporated territory series about the history of his homeland, the western Pacific island of Guåhan (Guam), and the culture of his indigenous Chamoru people. "Åmot" is the Chamoru word for "medicine," commonly referring to medicinal plants. Traditional Chamoru healers were known as yo'åmte; they gathered åmot in the jungle and recited chants and invocations of taotao'mona, or ancestral spirits, in the healing process. Through experimental and visual poetry, Perez explores how storytelling can become a symbolic form of åmot, offering healing from the traumas of colonialism, militarism, migration, environmental injustice, and the death of elders.
Winner of the Omnidawn Open Poetry Book Prize
"Borderland Apocrypha is centered around the collective histories of Mexican lynchings following the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, and the subsequent erasures, traumas, and state-sanctioned violences committed towards communities of color in the present day. Cody's debut collection responds to the destabilized, hostile landscapes and silenced histories via an experimental poetic that invents and shapeshifts in both form and space across the margin, the page, and the book's axis in a resistance, a reclamation and a re-occupation of what has been omitted. Part autohistoria, part docupoetic, part visual monument, part myth-making, Borderland Apocrypha exhumes the past in order to work toward survival, reckoning, and future- building"--
Stark lyric poems that outline the fragility of perception and the obstinacy of being
A lyric and historical examination of the Umbrella protests in Hong Kong
Kelli Anne Noftle's poems reside in this space of "threshold consciousness" where a voice speaks to and from the other, hovering inside a liminal world of strange admissions and abstract silences.
Counter-conjurations that query whether poetry itself might be a violent entrance of language into the world