Details

ISBN-10: 0872869113
ISBN-13: 9780872869110
Publisher: City Lights Books
Publish Date: 04/02/2024
Dimensions: 0.00" L, 0.00" W, 0.00" H

Published by City Lights

Isthmus to Abya Yala: City Lights Spotlight Series #23

Paperback

Price: $11.17

Overview

A conjuration of ancient consciousness aimed at rehumanizing our contemporary cyborg condition.

“What Roberto Harrison accomplishes within these pages of Abya Yala is not some super-imposed current but fiery liquefaction that ignites transparency as alchemic kinetic.”–Will Alexander, author of Divine Blue Light (for John Coltrane)

“Abya Yala”–“land of life” or “land of vital blood”–is a Pre-Columbian term of the Guna people of Panamá and Colombia to refer to the American continent and more recently has signified the idea of a decolonized “New World” among various Indigenous movements. In Isthmus to Abya Yala, Panamanian American poet Roberto Harrison summons a mythic consciousness in response to this political and spiritual struggle.

In his poems, with mystic fervor, Harrison finds phonetic unities concealing conceptual oppositions he must transcend. Invoking “mobilian” as an ur-language against racism and toward an all-inclusive humanity–in opposition to the “mobile” of phone-mediated existence–the poems of Isthmus to Abya Yala burn with a visionary ardor that overpowers rationality through an intensive accumulation of imagery. They even sometimes manifest as visual poems in the form of drawings he calls “Tecs,” opposing the dominance of technology to the advocacy of pan-Indian nationhood by 19th century Shawnee leader Tecumseh. “Tecumseh Republic” is the poet’s name for a new post-racial, post-national, post-binary, post-colonial, holistic and earth-oriented society with no national borders, with Panamá, the isthmus, as its only entry and exit.

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Reviews

Praise for Roberto Harrison:

"Roberto Harrison is a visionary . . . one who sees beyond ordinary reality, and further he has the skill to transmit these visions . . . ."–Julian Talamantez Brolaski, author of Of Mongrelitude

"I am incredibly thankful for this new book of poetry, prose, and drawing from the great Latino surrealist and one of the most generous and generative voices in poetry today, Roberto Harrison. In Tropical Lung, Harrison redoubles his commitment to sewing together the animal, the land, the human, the climate, and the technological."–Gabriel Ojeda-Sague, author of Losing Miami

"To play the poems of Tropical Lung inside yourself, to ingest its program, is to open a promise that, like Macutté Mong who drew the colonizers' executionary axe from out his head, we might 'abolish the binary hatchet' disturbing ourselves and cultures towards destruction, and live instead in Mabila, in a 'multiplicity of interface, ' in a posthuman imaginary, as Tecs in Tecumsah's republic. Harrison's recent books construct together a hugely ambitious visionary poetics of the Americas . . . I can't sufficiently stress how much we need what Harrison's writing dreams."–Lewis Freedman, author of Residual Synonyms for the Name of God

"Harrison's Tropical Lung is a shock of breath in the hemispheric heat. Each word is a sleepless, gasping shadow of the metamorphoses happening in the poet's bones and the continent's convulsions."–Edgar Garcia, author of Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography

"Harrison is a master."–Peter O'Leary, author of The Sampo

"In the great tradition of Latin American poets who've striven to sensually and intelligently sing of the terrible passage to regeneration, Harrison (adept and hip to that tradition) adds a new element: memory buffer overrun of historical consciousness."–Rodrigo Toscano, author of The Cut Point

"Roberto Harrison is a terrific poet. There is an underpinning of Mesoamerican shamanism to his work. Animals show up as spirit-doubles, plants dwell in their own conscious reality. . . . You never know if you are going to tip into vision or madness or some deeper state of mind. . . . The poems make me feel like a citizen of the archaic, the real world where all things are dancing, loud with significance."–Andrew Schelling, author of A Possible Bag

"In poems that slither in spiritual migration towards unity, Harrison becomes the visionary poet of the Anthropocene, the poet we need for the other side of our age."–Carmen Giménez Smith, author of Be Recorder

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Details

ISBN-10: 0872869113
ISBN-13: 9780872869110
Publisher: City Lights Books
Publish Date: 04/02/2024
Dimensions: 0.00" L, 0.00" W, 0.00" H
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