In this rapturous collection, Luisa A. Igloria maps sacred ecologies, violent histories, extracted geologies, and multispecies relations. Throughout, there is both praise and grief, as well as a desire to mouth nostalgia and feel the world before it is indelibly changed. Caulbearer invites us to witness the "unbearable cascade of beauty," from the celestial birth and death of stars to the yucca moth laying eggs inside a flower. These poems reckon a salty truth: "we don't know how long the world can hold / such specimens of tenderness." — Craig Santos Perez, winner, 2023 National Book Award for Poetry for from unincorporated territory [amot]
I count Luisa A. Igloria among a select tribe of memorializers who understand that the crepe myrtle and Bathala are chromatic kin. Caulbearer fuses the cosmic, the ecological, and the colonial, to give us a courageous meditation on the crises of beginnings and endings. "For now, this certainty..." the poet generously gestures. Whether the rambutan's diastole, the fragrance of highland pine, or the motherly communion of sea and moon, these poems are a tender offering in the tumult of our time. — Patrick Rosal, winner of the William Carlos Williams Book Award from the Poetry Society of America; Campus Co-director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers-Camden
In these remarkable poems, Luisa A. Igloria honors the gifts of nature and the chance to explore the fullness of our lives in partnership with the natural world even while lamenting the inevitability of its loss. Underscoring this environmental pain is the colonial harm enacted to a place and its people, to the land and the sea; all the while, the earth becomes a vessel for the grief we leave behind. Igloria perceptively threads past, present, and future—rich and beautifully textured—to humble us to the fragility of our existence. --Mai Der Vang, Winner of the 2022 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the 2022 American Book Award
In the face of injustice, these poems urge us to “say danger and defiance. / Not shoulder shrug, not fold over.” And perhaps it also becomes the task of the poet to reconcile where she can; to try to sweeten the life, past or present; to be the ginger flower whose “torch burns with scent in the middle/ of the garden. Not even the rain can put it out” —These poems are adamantine- dazzling and diamond-strong. In language at once keen and lulling, muscular and sumptuous, Igloria gives us a book of losses as well as recuperations." --Claire Wahmanholm, author of Wilder, winner of the 2022 Montreal International Poetry Prize
Restlessly transiting between the past and the present, homeland and diasporic home, consciousness and conscience, Luisa A. Igloria is our poet of the lyric cusp. In poems that deconstruct memory into its parts— complex nostalgia, bittersweet love— Maps for Migrants and Ghosts is at once gorgeous and painful. I read this book with intensity, feeling, in the words of one poem, “ecstatic and furious.” --Rick Barot, author of The Galleons
"It's telling, the things / we return to,” writes Luisa A. Igloria in this masterful new collection, where memory takes us on a journey that is full of music and wisdom. I opened this book on the poems about her mother and fell in love with this voice, one that has learned to be “completely alone, even among others,” a voice that knows how to enter the dark and find music in it. This lyric record of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts is a journey both spiritual and personal, one that understands that at our most private we still live in history, yet finds, in the terrors of that history, a healing melody, a tune. --IIya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa, Winner of The Los Angeles Times Book Award, The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, The National Jewish Book Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, The Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Metcalf Award, the Lannan Fellowship
Urgent yet delicate, Luisa A. Igloria's poetry excavates the rich material of the past. The poems fashion and refashion the self in flashes of dreams, apparitions of family long departed, and haunting regret. To cross the interstitial moments in these lyrical moments is to understand the losses one encounters when the world is leaving you behind. Yet in spite of the burdens catalogued in these remarkable poems, Igloria's power is in returning us to a residence in beauty when the voices of crickets return us to their scintillate choruses." --Oliver de la Paz, author of The Boy in the Labyrinth and Furious Lullaby
In old stories, the elders speak of warriors with heart: "nakem," of growing wiser as "growing in heart." In this fierce, sensual collection, Luisa A. Igloria tracks her own growing of heart, and in the process tears open the reader's heart as well. Her poems knife through the surfaces of ordinary life to reveal layers of poignancy, depth, and vulnerability. ...With razor-sharp language and an unflinching eye, she reveals a world of secret names given in childhood to confuse the gods, ...the ways past and present shadow each other, the urgent desire "to touch, be touched, be filled with fleeting grace." --Reine Arcache Melvin, author of A Normal Life and Other Stories
In prismatic prose poems of daughters and fathers, of aging and longing, of loves and laments, Luisa A. Igloria fashions for us an ancient tongue for the 21st century, one that gets to the heart of why poetry is written: the pure lyric impulse of trying to live. In a time when words too often play flippant ironic games, Igloria instead takes us beneath language's skin, to show us "how the planets align, how trees cast their shadows along the broken boundary; how the wolves howl as they press closer to their prey." --Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of Scything Grace and Death Prefers the Minor Keys, Winner, The Paterson Poetry Prize and The James Hearst Poetry Prize
Luisa A. Igloria establishes herself as a singular and revelatory voice in American poetry....Her engrossing poems hide, behind their gorgeous scrims, a bristling wall of spears. --Sabina Murray, author of Tales of the New World; A Carnivore's Inquiry; and The Caprices (PEN/ Faulkner Award)
I count Luisa A. Igloria among a select tribe of memorializers who understand that the crepe myrtle and Bathala are chromatic kin. Caulbearer fuses the cosmic, the ecological, and the colonial, to give us a courageous meditation on the crises of beginnings and endings. "For now, this certainty..." the poet generously gestures. Whether the rambutan's diastole, the fragrance of highland pine, or the motherly communion of sea and moon, these poems are a tender offering in the tumult of our time. — Patrick Rosal, winner of the William Carlos Williams Book Award from the Poetry Society of America; Campus Co-director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers-Camden
In these remarkable poems, Luisa A. Igloria honors the gifts of nature and the chance to explore the fullness of our lives in partnership with the natural world even while lamenting the inevitability of its loss. Underscoring this environmental pain is the colonial harm enacted to a place and its people, to the land and the sea; all the while, the earth becomes a vessel for the grief we leave behind. Igloria perceptively threads past, present, and future—rich and beautifully textured—to humble us to the fragility of our existence. --Mai Der Vang, Winner of the 2022 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the 2022 American Book Award
In the face of injustice, these poems urge us to “say danger and defiance. / Not shoulder shrug, not fold over.” And perhaps it also becomes the task of the poet to reconcile where she can; to try to sweeten the life, past or present; to be the ginger flower whose “torch burns with scent in the middle/ of the garden. Not even the rain can put it out” —These poems are adamantine- dazzling and diamond-strong. In language at once keen and lulling, muscular and sumptuous, Igloria gives us a book of losses as well as recuperations." --Claire Wahmanholm, author of Wilder, winner of the 2022 Montreal International Poetry Prize
Restlessly transiting between the past and the present, homeland and diasporic home, consciousness and conscience, Luisa A. Igloria is our poet of the lyric cusp. In poems that deconstruct memory into its parts— complex nostalgia, bittersweet love— Maps for Migrants and Ghosts is at once gorgeous and painful. I read this book with intensity, feeling, in the words of one poem, “ecstatic and furious.” --Rick Barot, author of The Galleons
"It's telling, the things / we return to,” writes Luisa A. Igloria in this masterful new collection, where memory takes us on a journey that is full of music and wisdom. I opened this book on the poems about her mother and fell in love with this voice, one that has learned to be “completely alone, even among others,” a voice that knows how to enter the dark and find music in it. This lyric record of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts is a journey both spiritual and personal, one that understands that at our most private we still live in history, yet finds, in the terrors of that history, a healing melody, a tune. --IIya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa, Winner of The Los Angeles Times Book Award, The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, The National Jewish Book Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, The Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Metcalf Award, the Lannan Fellowship
Urgent yet delicate, Luisa A. Igloria's poetry excavates the rich material of the past. The poems fashion and refashion the self in flashes of dreams, apparitions of family long departed, and haunting regret. To cross the interstitial moments in these lyrical moments is to understand the losses one encounters when the world is leaving you behind. Yet in spite of the burdens catalogued in these remarkable poems, Igloria's power is in returning us to a residence in beauty when the voices of crickets return us to their scintillate choruses." --Oliver de la Paz, author of The Boy in the Labyrinth and Furious Lullaby
In old stories, the elders speak of warriors with heart: "nakem," of growing wiser as "growing in heart." In this fierce, sensual collection, Luisa A. Igloria tracks her own growing of heart, and in the process tears open the reader's heart as well. Her poems knife through the surfaces of ordinary life to reveal layers of poignancy, depth, and vulnerability. ...With razor-sharp language and an unflinching eye, she reveals a world of secret names given in childhood to confuse the gods, ...the ways past and present shadow each other, the urgent desire "to touch, be touched, be filled with fleeting grace." --Reine Arcache Melvin, author of A Normal Life and Other Stories
In prismatic prose poems of daughters and fathers, of aging and longing, of loves and laments, Luisa A. Igloria fashions for us an ancient tongue for the 21st century, one that gets to the heart of why poetry is written: the pure lyric impulse of trying to live. In a time when words too often play flippant ironic games, Igloria instead takes us beneath language's skin, to show us "how the planets align, how trees cast their shadows along the broken boundary; how the wolves howl as they press closer to their prey." --Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of Scything Grace and Death Prefers the Minor Keys, Winner, The Paterson Poetry Prize and The James Hearst Poetry Prize
Luisa A. Igloria establishes herself as a singular and revelatory voice in American poetry....Her engrossing poems hide, behind their gorgeous scrims, a bristling wall of spears. --Sabina Murray, author of Tales of the New World; A Carnivore's Inquiry; and The Caprices (PEN/ Faulkner Award)