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Love in a Time of Climate Change by Craig Santos Perez
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Craig Santos Perez, from “Love in a Time of Climate Change”
[Text ID: I love you as one loves the most vulnerable / species: urgently, between the habitat and its loss. / I love you as one loves the last seed saved / within a vault,]
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Sonnet XVII
by Craig Santos Perez
I don’t love you as if you were rare earth metals, diamonds,
or reserves of crude oil that propagate war:
I love you as one loves most vulnerable things,
urgently, between the habitat and its loss.
I love you as the seed that doesn’t sprout but carries
the heritage of our roots, secured, within a vault,
and thanks to your love the organic taste that ripens
from the fruit lives sweetly on my tongue.
I love you without knowing how, or when, the world will end—
I love you naturally without pesticides or pills—
I love you like this because we won’t survive any other way,
except in this form in which humans and nature are kin,
so close that your emissions of carbon are mine,
so close that your sea rises with my heat.
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Halloween in the Anthropocene by Craig Santos Perez
Darkness spills across the sky like an oil plume.
The moon reflects bleached coral. Tonight, let us
praise the sacrificed. Praise the souls of black
boys, enslaved by supply chains, who carry
bags of cacao under West African heat. “Trick
or treat, smell my feet, give me something good
to eat,” sings a girl dressed as a Disney princess.
Let us praise the souls of brown girls who sew
our clothes as fire unthreads sweatshops into
smoke and ash. “Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me
something good,” whisper kids disguised as ninjas.
Tonight, let us praise the souls of Asian children
who manufacture toys and tech until gravity sharpens
their bodies enough to cut through suicide nets.
“Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me,” shout boys
camouflaged as soldiers. Let us praise the souls
of veterans who salute with their guns because
only triggers will pull God into their ruined
temples. “Trick or treat, smell my feet,” chant kids
masquerading as cowboys and Indians. Tonight,
let us praise the souls of native youth, whose eyes
are open-pit uranium mines, veins are poisoned
rivers, hearts are tar sands tailings ponds. “Trick
or treat,” says a boy dressed as the sun. Let us
praise El Niño, his growing pains, praise his mother,
Ocean, who is dying in a warming bath among dead
fish and refugee children. Let us praise our mothers
of asthma, mothers of cancer clusters, mothers of
miscarriage — pray for us — because our costumes
won’t hide the true cost of our greed. Praise our
mothers of lost habitats, mothers of fallout, mothers
of extinction — pray for us — because even tomorrow
will be haunted — leave them, leave us, leave —
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ginen sounding lines| Craig Santos Perez
– Chamorro poet
remember just dad
tied an old tire to
a metal fence pole
so [we] could practice
pitching—o say can you hear
the hollow sound when
the baseball strikes
rubber—the rattling when
it strikes wire—or
that perfect sound—
speak english only—
when [we] strike the pole
through the center of—o
say can you remember
just little league—barrigada
"tigers"—black and gold
uniforms—red…
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"ginen the micronesian kingfisher [i sihek]" (2014) by Craig Santos Perez
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Love in a Time of Climate Change
I don't love you as if you were rare earth metals,
conflict diamonds, or reserves of crude oil that cause
war. I love you as one loves the most vulnerable
species: urgently, between the habitat and its loss.
I love you as one loves the last seed saved
within a vault, gestating the heritage of our roots,
and thanks to your body, the taste that ripens
from its fruit still lives sweetly on my tongue.
I love you without knowing how or when this world
will end. I love you organically, without pesticides.
I love you like this because we'll only survive
in the nitrogen-rich compost of our embrace,
so close that your emissions of carbon are mine,
so close that your sea rises with my heat.
by Craig Santos Perez (recycling Pablo Neruda's "Sonnet XVII")
ht andy cahill
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Craig Santos Perez — Amor em tempos de mudanças climáticas
"Amor em tempos de mudanças climáticas", um poema de Craig Santos Perez, seguido do Soneto XVII", de Pablo Neruda
Amor em tempos de mudanças climáticas
reciclando o “Sonnet XVII”1 de Pablo Neruda
Não te amo como se fosses metais raros da terra,diamantes de sangue ou reservas de petróleo bruto que provocama guerra. Eu te amo como amamos as espécies mais vulneráveis: urgentemente, entre o habitat e a sua perda.
Eu te amo como se ama a última semente a salvodentro de um cofre, gestando a herança de nossas…
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I don't love you as if you were rare earth metals, conflict diamonds, or reserves of crude oil that cause war. I love you as one loves the most vulnerable species: urgently, between the habitat and its loss.
- Love in a Time of Climate Chang BY CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ
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Love in a Time of Climate Change by Craig Santos Perez
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I love your posts and I read a lot of poetry, do you have any recommendations? Like anthologies, authors, etc?
Hi!! Yes!! Of course!!
If you read a lot of poetry and are on Tumblr I'm assuming you've already read Louise Glück, Richard Siken, Jack Gilbert, Danez Smith, Kaveh Akbar, Ada Limón, Anne Carson and Mary Oliver. There's a lot of their poems circulating on here, so I'll try to rec poets I've not seen as much of.
In no particular order:
NOBEL PRIZE WINNER Carl Philips, Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020
Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces
Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic
Paige Lewis, Space Struck
Wisława Szymborska, Monologue of a Dog
Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America
Craig Santos Perez, Habitat Threshold
I've also really loved Anna Akhmatova's poems, but haven't read a full collection of hers. I'd recommend reading The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry edited by Ilya Kaminsky & Susan Harris, which features some of her work.
If you're just looking for a good way to discover poets you might like, check out the various collections posted by the editors on poetryfoundation.org. I like this one in particular.
And finally, not a poet, but one of my all time favourite theorists and a speech I keep coming back to: Judith Butler's talk on rage and grief. It's only about 10 minutes long and it might just be my favourite thing in the whole entire world.
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2023 poetry rec list
technically a day late but who cares! i don't. it's gonna be a long one this year too despite not having read or written as much poetry as of late; i'm putting my overall fifteen favorite + poetry book recs up here and the rest below a cut to spare your dashboards :)
2022
2021
books:
calling a wolf a wolf (kaveh akbar)
cinema of the present (lisa robertson)
dictee (theresa hak kyung cha)
pilgrim bell (kaveh akbar)
prelude to bruise (saeed jones)
the crown ain't worth much (hanif abdurraqib)
top 15:
abecedarian requiring further examination of anglikan seraphym subjugation of a wild indian reservation (natalie diaz)
about eight minutes of light (robert king)
at luca signorelli's resurrection of the body (jorie graham)
ginen the micronesian kingfisher [i sihek] (craig santos perez)
gods, gods, powers, lord, universe-- (chen chen)
kupu rere kē (alice te punga somerville)
look (solmaz sharif)
ode to the 9,000 year old woman (@/goodbyevitamin)
one art (elizabeth bishop)
petitioning the patron saint of childbirth (danielle boodoo-fortuné)
so mexicans are taking jobs from americans (jimmy santiago baca)
the death loop (jon lovett)
the difficult miracle of black poetry in america: something like a sonnet for phillis wheatley (june jordan)
the madwoman as rasta medusa (shara mccallum)
vocabulary (safia elhillo)
& the gun echoed for centuries; interlude with drug of course; & the light devours us all (yasmin belkhyr)
a brother named gethsemane (natalie diaz)
a map to the next world (joy harjo)
between autumn equinox and winter solstice, today (emily jungmin yoon)
cherish this ecstasy (david james duncan)
coffins (derick thomson)
conflict resolution for holy beings (joy harjo)
failing and flying (jack gilbert)
ginen tidelands [latte stone park] [hagåtña, guåhan] (craig santos perez)
how to be a dog (andrew kane)
i love you to the moon & (chen chen)
i'm sorry birds (@/quezify)
insomnia and the seven steps to grace (joy harjo)
i was sleeping where the black oaks move (louise erdrich)
i watch her eat the apple (natalie diaz)
moth wings and other things (@/grendel-menz)
my father (ollie schminkey)
my soldier, my stranger (scherezade siobhan)
new year's day (joan tierney)
october (louise glück)
praise song for oceania (craig santos perez)
praise the rain (joy harjo)
real estate (richard siken)
sharing a cigarette with joan of arc (dante emile)
song of the anti-sisyphus (chen chen)
table (edip cansever, transl. richard tillinghast)
tear it down (jack gilbert)
temporary job (minnie bruce pratt)
the blue dress (saeed jones)
the lesson of the moth (don marquis)
the universe, as in one last song for the lonely hearts (michelle hulan)
throwing children (ross gay)
untitled (joan tierney)
voices (naomi shihab nye)
when i die i want your hands on my eyes (pablo neruda)
why i am not coming in to work today (jess zimmerman)
wolf moon (nina maclaughlin)
yes, it was the mountain echo (william wordsworth)
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[T]hose who live and think at the shore, where the boundary between land and water is so often muddied that terrestrial principles of Western private property regimes feel like fictions, can easily understand how indebted we are to waterways. [...] [T]hese interstitial spaces underpin theories of not only liminality, but also adaptation, flow, and interconnection. Shorelines, indeed, do much to trouble the neat boundaries, borders [...] of the colonial imaginary [...].
Wading in the shallows long enough makes apparent that the shallows is not a place, but a temporal condition of submerging and surfacing through water. [...] And so thinking about shallows necessitates attention to the multiplicity of water, and the ways that tides, rivers, storm clouds, tide pools, and aquifers converse with the ocean to produce [...] archipelagic thinking.
For Kanaka Maoli, the muliwai, or estuary, best theorizes shoreline dynamics: It is not only where land and water mix, but also where different kinds of waters mix. Sea and river water mingle together to produce the brackish conditions that tenderly support certain plant and aquatic lives. It also informs approaches to aloha ʻāina, a Native Hawaiian place-based praxis of care. As Philipp Schorch and Noelle M.K.Y. Kahanu explain,
the muliwai ebbs and flows with the tide, changing shape and form daily and seasonally. In metaphorical terms, the muliwai is a location and state of dissonance where and when two potentially disharmonious elements meet, but it is not “a space in between,” rather, it is its own space, a territory unique in each circumstance, depending the size and strength or a recent hard rain. [...]
---
[T]he muliwai might be better characterized not as a space, but instead as a conditional state that undoes territorial logics. Muliwai expand and contract; withhold and deluge; nurture and sweep clean. It is not a space of exception. Rather, it is where we are reminded that places are never fixed or pure or static.
Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez reminds us in his critique of US territorialism that “territorialities are shifting currents, not irreducible elements.” If fixity and containment limit, by design, how futures might be imagined beyond property, then the muliwai envisions decolonial spaces as ones of tenderness, care, and interdependence. [...]
---
But what do we make of the muliwai, the shoal, or the wake, when its movements become increasingly erratic, violent, or unpredictable? [...] The disappearing glacier and the sinking island have become visual bellwethers for the so-called Age of the Anthropocene [...]. Because water has the potential to trouble the boundaries of humanness, it may furthermore push us to think through [...] categorical differences [...]. What happens when we turn our attention to the nonhuman in order to track anthropogenic mobilities; not to flatten the categories of human, but, rather, to consider the colonial mechanisms that produced hierarchies of bodies to begin with? [...] When we linger with waters at the shore, we open ourselves up to evidence that lands and waters are not distinct from each other, that they both flow and flee, and that keeping good relations is fundamental [...].
It is worth returning to the muliwai and its lessons in muddiness, movement, and care to think about the possibilities that emerge from the conditions of change that allow new life to take hold [...].
---
Text by: Hi’ilei Julia Hobart. “On Oceanic Fugitivity.” Ways of Water series, Items, Social Science Research Council. Published online 29 September 2020. [Some paragraph breaks added by me.]
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october 23rd
HALLOWEEN IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
Darkness spills across the sky like an oil plume.
The moon reflects bleached coral. Tonight, let us
praise the sacrificed. Praise the souls of black
boys, enslaved by supply chains, who carry
bags of cacao under West African heat. “Trick
or treat, smell my feet, give me something good
to eat,” sings a girl dressed as a Disney princess.
Let us praise the souls of brown girls who sew
our clothes as fire unthreads sweatshops into
smoke and ash. “Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me
something good,” whisper kids disguised as ninjas.
Tonight, let us praise the souls of Asian children
who manufacture toys and tech until gravity sharpens
their bodies enough to cut through suicide nets.
“Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me,” shout boys
camouflaged as soldiers. Let us praise the souls
of veterans who salute with their guns because
only triggers will pull God into their ruined
temples. “Trick or treat, smell my feet,” chant kids
masquerading as cowboys and Indians. Tonight,
let us praise the souls of native youth, whose eyes
are open-pit uranium mines, veins are poisoned
rivers, hearts are tar sands tailings ponds. “Trick
or treat,” says a boy dressed as the sun. Let us
praise El Niño, his growing pains, praise his mother,
Ocean, who is dying in a warming bath among dead
fish and refugee children. Let us praise our mothers
of asthma, mothers of cancer clusters, mothers of
miscarriage — pray for us — because our costumes
won’t hide the true cost of our greed. Praise our
mothers of lost habitats, mothers of fallout, mothers
of extinction — pray for us — because even tomorrow
will be haunted — leave them, leave us, leave —
—Craig Santos Perez
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