LINEAGE, LANGUAGE & LANDSCAPE: POETRY DEBUTS – POETRY
In Black Mestiza, Yael Valencia Aldana reckons with her identity as a Caribbean Afro-Latinx/e woman with Indigenous, Black, and white roots and pays homage to the legacy, resilience, and fortitude of her ancestors as a mixed-race woman, daughter, and mother. Drawing on various languages and geographies from South Korea to Peru to the American heartland, Ae Hee Lee’s Asterism is a collection of grace and grit, the work of a mind at work – in, and on, a world that is simultaneously expanding and contracting. Moving from Mostar to Oaxaca, Paris to Taormina, the poems in Jo-Ann Mort’s A Precise Chaos reflect her experiences as a trade union activist, a political organizer, and a peace activist in the Middle East. Dormilona by Connie Mae Oliver is a bilingual book of poetry exploring dream states, distance, and the rituals of sleep. Meaning both “nightgown” and “sleepyhead” in Venezuelan Spanish, dormilona weaves a neural network linking sleep to matrilineal memory, time, and geography.
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