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Overview
"Referring to the American continent, 'Abya Yala' ('land of life') is a pre-Columbian term of the Guna people of Panamá and Colombia. Harrison wrestles with language, racism, and humanity in political and spiritual poems."—Publishers Weekly, Most Anticipated Poetry Books, Spring 2024
“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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780872869110 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | City Lights Books |
| Publication date: | 04/02/2024 |
| Pages: | 88 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 7.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
DELETE MOUNT RUSHMORE
the color of blood and the color of night
fail to be shadows
as the rope pulls its own
family detriment on the underside of the face.
as the remainder pushes to a nuclear shirt
and some background exception places the red
mark under the jungle process to redo the body
and feel out the fast calculation of an ulterior
mind. where the most correct description does
its fashion under the coat and deceives what
the momentary escape from murder, the small
conversation show that the country makes
as it falls. when the season and its hostile
number relieve what a grown bank rot
of the execution that does not allow, the face to face
wheel that takes away, the underlying force
in the ocean swelling to betray the declaration
and its precepts circling accumulation
and sorrow. without one to release and to become
the memory of its relation outside of the haunt
of the business cycle of terror, or the mud climbing
return to the home of the Sea, as its language is
placed outside on the many growths of the front
to equate the weapons and the salt. but then
the eatery comes on to resent and to happen as
a connection to wind and terror again with mud
on my hands. where is the blood? what the four
returns to the approaching eastern side of the soft
resemblance as some sentimental pit allows the exec
to kill her again and to run without memory
as the tree and its resin does not count. also
the arrangement and the sound of nothing does
to belong and cross out the meaning of books,
and to resemble another voter that is cut
and weaponized beyond the number of surprise
and the about of the wicked was to move under
as confusion was not mine but shared and trouble
like the force of a wheel and its return to the ground
“PREHISTORIC” ORIGINS OF THE FUTURE
death marks the red for the end of a stop
by a light made to weep in the straw as one sees
as many attach to the force of the light and become
we turn for the circle through heat and a face
they move to decide what the force weaves about
with forms to become with a jump and a gate and a cue
they follow the ice and the log to endure in a view
with a cut to perceive and attend as a sign
four zooms as they carry three goats for the news
they stroll with attachments of down in their heads
each launches a boat with a two and a three
to whittle a nerve and believe in the four
without the protectorate time and a fallow relief
the icicles mark the alarm and the snow becomes steep
in a force to be light for the fire
we end up rebinding the wood
we as they force the removal of worms
to return the allotment and mark a free earth
with windows and faces and interface haunts
on the power left sign to believe
SENT IN MOBILIAN JARGON VIA ISTHMUSES
hosts in the sky make paths through the carriers
they fold to return to the oceans and dust by the face
i remember to walk and reveal every story and wind
under night. packets of light and the sounds of the shells
keep up as the one of a presence will stare through the window
of 2 every day. that was our training for now with the screens
and that was the broken outside that has grown in the Sea
marked for a country of signs. each song does not stop
at the cut for the race, and each does not know their own
neck. they yell out for salvation and move to belong to the corn,
but the wind is the same as the river through seasons read close
by return. whenever the segments of life now entomb our
thick webs for the answer, as they find one to touch and be soft
for the war, our beacons call ice to remain in the underground
Oceans to find us a way to endure. each pulse will not member
the time of the shadow, each limb calls itself from the heart
of the other to claim an intention for dust and the Sea. but Carib
explosions reveal what the night has to offer survivors as each
of its sparks Start a fire to begin without knees. even as starlight
will never remember our answers
to the singular mouth of beginning,
even as wars become lost through the trees and their talk
underground makes us bleed, our beliefs are not finished
from Starting and falling anew. but the documents show
that there was a balance to books
but that law had removed this from us
in the color of twilight, bled like the animals gone. every
night i become like the ceiling of exits and call us the grandmother
song. we sink then to freeze like each catalog marked with an entry
of ancient intention and surfaced for standing to make with a door
for the entry of love. all my relations are gone and become
like the spirit of Crazy Horse pierced through my side. i was a they
as a Tec made to wander Mabila, and i was a zero to see
like the one of return to the night. Mabila just wanders and coats
every wound with attachment and silence as mounds remain
witness to song and survivance. but the world stays the same
for the blind and Mabila has moved to the isthmus inside
as we’re mobile in wandering Go for the Mongol invaders
and as the empires will rise and collapse for Tecumseh
made dust for the Caribs through raids on the Sea