Maps for Migrants and Ghosts

by Luisa A. Igloria

Overview

Language as key and map to places, people, and histories lost
 
For immigrants and migrants, the wounds of colonization, displacement, and exile remain unhealed. Crossing oceans and generations, from her childhood home in Baguio City, the Philippines, to her immigrant home in Virginia, poet Luisa A. Igloria demonstrates how even our most personal and intimate experiences are linked to the larger collective histories that came before.

In this poetry collection, Igloria brings together personal and family histories, ruminates on the waxing and waning of family fortunes, and reminds us how immigration necessitates and compels transformations. Simultaneously at home and displaced in two different worlds, the speaker lives in the past and the present, and the return to her origins is fraught with disappointment, familiarity, and alienation.

Language serves as a key and a map to the places and people that have been lost. This collection folds memories, encounters, portraits, and vignettes, familiar and alien, into both an individual history and a shared collective history—a grandfather’s ghost stubbornly refusing to come in out of the rain, an elderly mother casually dropping YOLO into conversation, and the speaker’s abandonment of her childhood home for a second time.
The poems in this collection spring out of a deep longing for place, for the past, for the selves we used to be before we traveled to where we are now, before we became who we are now. A stunning addition to the work of immigrant and migrant women poets on their diasporas, Maps for Migrants and Ghosts reveals a dream landscape at the edge of this world that is always moving, not moving, changing, and not changing.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809337934
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	09/09/2020
Series:	Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	97
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Luisa A. Igloria is the author of fourteen books of poetry, most recently The Buddha Wonders If She Is Having a Mid-Life Crisis; and the recipient of many awards including the May Swenson Prize and the Resurgence Poetry Prize, the world’s first major ecopoetry award. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, Poetry, Poetry East, Shenandoah, Crab Orchard Review, Lantern Review, and Cha.

 

Read an Excerpt

THE HEART'S EVERY HEAVE

Say cotton, say the crease
in the sleeve of a shirt,

the plainness in a collar,
the brim of a hat. If the future

is here, whose face greets you
in the mirror as you collect

water in your hands; as you hand
your money over the counter

to pay for bread, a cup of coffee,
a ticket? A man on the train steps

in the path of someone he doesn’t
even know, or trails another man

home in his truck for two
whole miles to spew insults

in his foreign-looking face. How
is this the future too? Your heart

holds its breath, lurches from platform
to crowded lobby. Say elegy, insistence,

not blank stare. Say danger and defiance.
Not shoulder shrug, not fold over.


MOTHER: THREE PICTURES 

She is beautiful in that photograph where they are dancing in a 
roomful of other couples. She has a beauty mole penciled on her
cheek, slightly to the right of her lip. Her eyebrows are two perfect
arches, her hair a dark beehive. I think there are dots on her dress. 
Where is this photograph? I would like very much to have it.
*
In another she is posing on a terrace overlooking the crater lake 
with Taal Volcano in the center. She is beside a famous painter 
who has nonetheless been introduced to us as the wife of a famous 
painter: a long-lost cousin of my father who paints in the naïf 
style—audacious colors, bold outlines. You could say that piety is
her subject: all saints, religious icons. Mother looks like a young 
Audrey Hepburn with a cropped hairstyle, in a plain black dress 
she sewed herself.
*
I vaguely remember seeing a thin album of wedding pictures, all 
in sepia. I do not think she wore a veil. Her dress may have been
a sheath. There was a picture of them cutting a cake. From the 
church ceremony, a picture of father’s niece and nephew putting 
the cord around their shoulders. The cord like an 8. Infinity 
grounded by a knot in the center.


ON KEEPING

She spoke the languages of flour,
of salt, of pepper. From her hands

issued heat and steam;
from her hips, small

constellations still learning
the lessons of combustion.

Once, we tore newspapers
into tiny squares and fed them

to the maw of a makeshift stove.
Windows lit up with low-

wattage light. It was enough
to see by—enough to weigh

into logs and stud with dried
fruit, cloves, honey: they kept

nearly six months in tins,
tightly wrapped, unopened.

When she flew away, a moth
circled the milky light.

The kitchen drawers exhaled
all spice from their hearts.


SYSTEM

The hornet mines
pulp for her paper house.

My house is fragile too:
a wave could knock it flat,

a deadly gust of wind.
Cold coil of winter,

unholy fire of summer.
If only I could gird

the windows with a low,
unceasing drone, fasten

stings with locks
on all the gates.


DREAM LANDSCAPE AT THE EDGE OF THIS WORLD

​What to make of a dream in which
fields are littered with decapitated
remains, the sightless heads of the fallen
in even rows tilted up at the sky, their hair
matted with dried blood yet somehow
artfully arranged like fringes of grotesque
sunflowers? What to make of the pair of us,
winding hand in hand through grounds
made slick with the issue from these bodies,
the air rank and thick with flies? You were
frailer than I ever remembered, slight
in a thin cotton wrapper, undone by
the terrible waste surrounding us. I led
as if now the parent and you the child,
feeling as if somehow I’d been there before,
winding through maze-like paths flanked
by hedges made of reeds whose ends
were quilled blades. Ahead, an armored
shape emerged from out of its cave; I stayed
our progress, trembling in the crosshatches.
What might we do if we had plumes or wings?
And yet on every side, the puce from doves’
breasts dripped warnings on the rocks. Bent low
to the ground, at last we found our way to where
a dying sentinel stood guard at the edge of this
world: he dipped his finger in his blood and marked
our heads; then pointed out the exit in the distance.

Table of Contents

Contents

I

Song of Meridians 

The Heart’s Every Heave 

Fatalism 

Maps for Migrants and Ghosts 

Casida of Weeping 

Moving, Changing, Not Moving 

Photograph, 1959 

Coup de Grâce 

Mother: Three Pictures 

We don’t live in the light 

Self-Portrait, with Beetles in Sugar 

Measure 

Hibernal 

Theory of Instruction 

If I Call Love, Who Will Answer? 

Graeae 

I Don’t Have Feelings for the Angel 

II

Sparrow Palace 

Elegy for Loss 

On Keeping 

Decryption 

Smoke 

Where the Seed Scattered 

Dream of Flight, with Bus Attendant 

Synecdoche 

Prodigal 

Portraits 

First Night: In Mother’s House 

Volta 

Gathering Figs in the Rain 

Open House 

In the hotel with thin walls and the name of a poet, 

She Remembers Her Father’s Blue Eyes 

Caravan 

System 

Texture of the Lost 

Half-Life 

Buttonholes 

Letter to —— in Increments 

When I Think I Could Be Beautiful 

Sensorium 

III

North 

Looking for Lorenzo 

Dead Woman’s Float 

Orchard 

Madrigal 

Understudy 

Sketches in a Genealogy 

Material 

Ghost Crab 

How to Enter the Dark 

Indenture 

Field Notes 

Orchard 

Hortus Conclusus 

A Reparation 

Self-Portrait, Reconstructed with Heirloom Beads 

YOLO 

Five Remedies for Sadness 

Dream Landscape at the Edge of This World 

Lying here in the darkness, I let the days obliterate me 

Calling the Soul Back to the Body 

Acknowledgments 

Editorial Reviews

“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

 

“Restlessly transiting between the past and the present, homeland and diasporic home, consciousness and conscience, Luisa 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.”—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

 

“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

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From the Publisher