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![From Unincorporated Territory [åmot] by Craig Santos Perez](/images/previews_images/9781632431189.jpg "From Unincorporated Territory [åmot] by Craig Santos Perez")
by Craig Santos Perez
Experimental and visual poems diving into the history and culture of the poet's homeland, Guam.
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. "Åmot" is the Chamoru word for "medicine," commonly referring to medicinal plants. 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.
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.
National Book Awards, 2023
"Perez's ongoing project is one of the longest-running and most rewarding literary engagements with Pacific Islander and Indigenous poetics of the twenty-first century." ―Booklist (starred review)
"A rich and expansive collection of fragments, fractals, family stories and archival material, from unincorporated territory [åmot] holds elegies for the past and present around a land and people still in flux; of occupation and mourning, loss and family, flora and fauna, documenting the visual literacies of an island and its people, examining what erodes and what holds, and what might already be lost." ―rob mclennan's blog
"Say you want poetry that both innovates and accumulates, something with brainteasing difficulty and world-building breadth—part modernism, part Marvel Cinematic Universe. One sure bet, for 15 years and counting, is the ongoing series from unincorporated territory by Craig Santos Perez, an indigenous Chamoru poet-scholar from Guåhan (Guam)... . In this fifth installment, that Chamoru word is [åmot], meaning 'medicine'; the word commonly refers to plants, but as Perez explains, specialists in åmot employ a plethora of healing practices, including massage, dietary advice, and 'prayers, chants, and the invocation of i taotao'mona, or ancestral spirits'—centuries-old rituals undergirding Perez's verbal arts." ―Harriet
"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. 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. Propelled by gratitude, this book is a call to defy and protect, a sea of poetic innovation and care." -―No'u Revilla, author of Ask the Brindled
"In from unincorporated territory [åmot], 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 Chamoru people. 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. But for endurance and renewal there is hope; each poem-story is itself a plant that yields a seed the speaker gathers. Each seed bursts its casing to branch into a meeting place for inter-generational memory and wisdom. What was deemed unworthy, flowers wildly, coded in the name of the plants reclaiming their Chamoru names banking these pages. In this collection 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." ―Rajiv Mohabir, author of Cutlish
This information about From Unincorporated Territory [åmot] was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Craig Santos Perez is an indigenous Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam). He is the coeditor of six anthologies; the author of five poetry collections, including Habitat Threshold; and the author of the monograph, Navigating Chamoru Poetry: Indigeneity, Aesthetics, and Decolonization. He is professor in the English department at the University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa. He has received the American Book Award, Pen Center USA/Poetry Society of America Literary Prize, Hawaiʻi Literary Arts Council Award, Nautilus Book Award, and the George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature from the Associated Writing Programs.
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