from unincorporated territory [guma’] by Craig Santos Pérez

In this collection Craig Santos Perez’s vital poems prove yet again that his necessary and clear voice is one that shakes the foundations of nation and demands of the reader to consider their complicity in the machinations of Empire. What was deemed unworthy, flowers wildly, coded in the name of the plants reclaiming their CHamoru names banking these pages. Each seed bursts its casing to branch into a meeting place for inter-generational memory and wisdom. But for endurance and renewal there is hope each poem-story is itself a plant that yields a seed the speaker gathers. From elegies for loved ones, continual rewriting of prayer, and eating rice with the grandmother, the rituals in this collection bear the histories of family, of the church’s spiritual abuse, and of the colonization of the island. In from unincorporated territory, Craig Santos Perez sings down healing for the speaker who asks, “isn’t that too / what it means to be / a diasporic chamorus // to feel foreign in your own homeland.” Each poem probes this question against the continued disenfranchisement and militarization of Guåhan and the CHomoru people. Noʻu Revilla, author of Ask the Brindled Propelled by gratitude, this book is a call to defy and protect, a sea of poetic innovation and care. If a poem could unstitch a barbed wire fence, throw net, play bingo, unshipwreck Indigenous youth, care for elders, or heal a broken heart with Spam, that poem is in these pages. Through experimental and visual poetry, Perez explores how storytelling can become a symbolic form of åmot, offering healing from the traumas of colonialism, militarism, migration, environmental injustice, and the death of elders.Ĭraig Santos Perez continues to expand visual literacies of Pacific Literature as he grapples with the question: what does it mean to write the ocean? Here are handwoven, blessed nets of intergenerational Chamoru stories. Traditional Chamoru healers were known as yo’åmte they gathered åmot in the jungle and recited chants and invocations of taotao’mona, or ancestral spirits, in the healing process. “Åmot” is the Chamoru word for “medicine,” commonly referring to medicinal plants. This book is the fifth collection in Craig Santos Perez’s ongoing from unincorporated territory series about the history of his homeland, the western Pacific island of Guåhan (Guam), and the culture of his indigenous Chamoru people.

Purchase book from Omnidawn Publishing hereĮxperimental and visual poems diving into the history and culture of the poet’s homeland, Guam.

From unincorporated territory [guma’] by Craig Santos Pérez