Description: This anthology furthers this braiding with the work of four emerging Pacific islander women poets from Guam, Hawaiʻi, and Fiji. Despite their distant origins, all these writers explore culture, history, politics, genealogy, feminism, and the environment. They each have their own unique style, ranging from the lyric to the avant-garde.
Review Quotes:
'The voices that gather here, in Effigies III, take shape and rhythm from the ocean itself. Chamoru, Kanaka 'Ōiwi, Fijian and Tongan, these poets of Oceania speak of and for the waters and all its relatives with perceptive, critical and lyrically stunning undulations. Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio's beating of the sharkskin drum echoes a heartbeat found in Kisha Borja-Quichocho-Calvo's letters to her young Chamoru daughter, and Tagi Qolouvaki's stories of home and forgotten gods sing alongside No'u Revilla's wonderfully rich exhortations, ablutions and incantations. Indigenous Oceania is gathering, and its daughters' voices are at the forefront of positive change for the future of its islands, waters, and people.' --Lehua M. Taitano, author of A Bell Made of Stones and Inside Me an Island
'Effigies III gathers work "rooted 2000 generations deep" in the homelands of these Indigenous Pacific Islands' women. A stunning collection of poetry that privileges Native knowledge, language, mapping, and gods over those imposed by colonizers, it is filled with the sacred and everyday fruits of these environments: lush images of traditional foods and medicines from fresh coconut to kava roots; home figured as mountain ranges like Ko'olau and the treasured "latte stone huts;" and the "blue skin" of ocean ultimately indivisible from the human bodies who belong to these islands and the several Indigenous languages they speak--an ocean that "spills vowels" in these poems. But for all the poetic beauty of this collection, we should not mistake the vision or intention of these women. The work here stands as an effort to "sit in history" and to recite a "geneology of protest." The poems unmask environmental destruction--"the god choking concrete" and islands "fracked by GMO farming / Geothermal drilling" by those who worship "dollar bill idols." Ultimately, these words "connect us to our past" and thus "shield ... our children" from the contemporary capitalistic "wildfire" that endangers us.' --Kimberly Blaeser, author of Apprenticed to Justice, Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2015-16