Las Palmas

Reviews / Votes

"Las Palmas is a [book] of immersion. Here, the poet weaves an intergenerational narrative of place and play that brings voice-no, chorus-to landscapes gathered in our midst. These poems speak in tongues both necessary and innovative, where language sparks a new world irresistibly familiar." -- Brody Parrish Craig, judge of the 2023 Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest "In the creativity of Las Palmas, we are invited to the crossroads of modal freedom both page-bound and blood oath. To a chronology of reckoning. Dreamscape is training ground; is theater of new form and decolonial instruction. A crossroads where alongside ancestry, a spear has a mathematics from the future; a dialogue in all epochs. This collection is a chronicle of a spirit casually transcendent." -- Tongo Eisen-Martin, author of "Heaven Is All Goodbyes" "Around the ludicrous, colonial-capitalist name Puerto Rico, 'Rich Port,' Las Palmas geographizes, topographizes, hydrologizes an/other set of memorious islands, steadily adrift. These poems, brimming with 'broken' syllables and single letters that question confident meaning-making and verse-reading, as archipelagoes also tend to do, craft a benthic map of unseen affective basins. Here, the insular body-both human and more-than-human-with its dense geological and material history of privations and accretions, comes to restless rest through movements at once wanted and forced. As with William Carlos Williams's indomitable mother from Mayagueez, the poet's madre, tia, hermanas, and abuela, to whom the book is dedicated, constitute an unshakeable chord, if not umbilical then submarinely mountainous, connecting Boriken's sovereign longing to that of all hyper-exploited islands refusing to forget-and to let go of each other." -- Beatriz Llenin Figueroa, author of "Affect, Archive, Archipelago: Puerto Rico's Sovereign Caribbean Lives"