Gravity Prevails
Published on 25. January 2022
Book
Paperback/Softback
128 pages
978-1-953447-41-8 (ISBN)
Description
Deeply aware of the centuries-old history, geography, and culture of the land spanning Texas and Mexico, Kamala Platt offers in Gravity Prevails the richness of re-memories of this living, breathing colonized geography that continues to nurture its inhabitants, human, animal, and flora. In rich lyricism, sonorous with Spanish, Indian and English languages, the poet hears men and women from the past, echoed by seedlings calling the names of the living and the departed. We are woken up to recognize the plants and the birds that make our lives beautiful but whose lives have become more and more precarious in our "civilization" with its "man-generated climate change." Will nature continue to prevail? Egrets return even when they are displaced, but some plants are unable to return when we destroy the soil. Kamala feels with the earth. She writes, "Gardeners work with the soil....a living ecosystem," cognizant of the body's dance with the earth, listening to its heartbeat and learning from it how to live. Kamala's "Gravity Prevails" is an urgent plea to us to pay attention to our injustice toward indigenous and marginalized people, to the planet itself, and, therefore, live life protecting Earth mother, Pachamama, who protects us. This volume is essential reading for anyone with a conscience.
¿ Pramila Venkateswaran, poet laureate of Suffolk County, NY, and author of The Singer of Alleppey (Shanti Arts, 2018)
More details
Language
English
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 7 mm
Weight
198 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-953447-41-8 (9781953447418)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Kamala Platt, Ph.D., MFA is an author, artist, independent scholar and contingent professor living in South Texas and at The Meadowlark Center, Kansas. She currently teaches creative writing, Chicana Poetry, Environmental Justice Poetics and Pen Project Prison Teaching for the School of Humanities,Arts and Cultural Studies in Arizona State University's Online Program. She has shared her visual art and poetry widely, often in community arts and cultural centers and at conferences. Last year's highlight exhibit was "Bird Island Photo Diptich: I. Summer Pachanga & II. Halcyon Hellscape afterAdvent Attacks" in "Emotional Numbness: The impact of war on the human psyche and ecosystems" at Platform 3, Tehran, Iran, and Online, July 2020 - January 2021. She also participated in Zoom poetry readings in conjunction with Stone in the Stream, Sierra Club, Bihl Haus, and more.Through "green rascuache" lifeways, Kamala searches borderlands for footholds of dignity & well-being (resistance to walls, injustices, militarisms, 'isms, ecological disrespect...) amidst a feverish planet's crises. Her current scholarship shares women's environmental justice poetics creating a lens through which to understand visions of a "sustainable" future. She is preparing her manuscript environmental Justice Poetics: Cultural Representations of Environmental Racism from Chicanas and Women in India for publication with De Gruyter in Berlin. Her Westside Barrio, San Antonio home and nearby "Garden of Good Trouble" host native habitat, garden, and orchard offering seasonal produce: limones, loquats, nopalitos, tunas, figs, and pomegranites to share; a library andstudio hold books & art. Family roots in ecology and human rights and a cross-cultural childhood among Mennonites in Kansas, & family friends/coworkers in Orissa (Odisha), India, provides foundation. In recent years, Fuerza Unida, Esperanza Center for Peace & Justice, Texas Master Naturalists, Cultural Capital, Climate Reality Leadership and Texas Women Farmers' HolisticManagement and Native Plant, Bonsai, and Cactus & Xerophyte groups have built her knowledge and she currently works in solidarity with groups supporting immigrants and other marginalized and displaced communities including SA Stands, and San Antonio Coalition for Police Accountability.Kamala has held fellowships with Center for the Study of Women and Society, OU (Women, Science & the Sacred), Feminist Research Institute (UNM) and the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center (Gateways) in San Antonio. She holds an MFA in poetry (BGSU, Ohio), an MA in Interdisciplinary Arts(Columbia College, Chicago), a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (UT, Austin) and an undergraduate degree (Art, International Development, Religion), Bethel College, Kansas.