Navigating Chamoru Poetry

For the first time, Navigating CHamoru Poetry focuses on Indigenous CHamoru (Chamorro) poetry from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam). In this book, poet and scholar Craig Santos Perez navigates the complex relationship between CHamoru poetry, cultural identity, decolonial politics, diasporic migrations, and native aesthetics.

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.

American ecopoetries of migration explore the conflicted relationships of mobile subjects to the nonhuman world and thus offer valuable environmental insight for our current age of mass mobility and global ecological crisis. In Ecopoetic Place-Making, Judith Rauscher analyzes the works of five contemporary American poets of migration, drawing from ecocriticism and mobility studies. The poets discussed in her study challenge exclusionary notions of place-attachment and engage in ecopoetic place-making from different perspectives of mobility, testifying to the potential of poetry as a means of conceptualizing alternative environmental imaginaries for our contemporary world on the move.

Bombarded with the equivalent of one Hiroshima bomb a day for half a century, Pacific people have long been subjected to man-made cataclysm. Well before climate change became a global concern, nuclear testing brought about untimely death, widespread diseases, forced migration, and irreparable destruction to the shores of Oceania. In The Ocean on Fire, Anaïs Maurer analyzes the Pacific literature that incriminates the environmental racism behind radioactive skies and rising seas. Maurer identifies strategies of resistance uniting the region by analyzing an extensive multilingual archive of decolonial Pacific art in French, Spanish, English, Tahitian, and Uvean, ranging from literature to songs and paintings. She shows how Pacific nuclear survivors’ stories reveal an alternative vision of the apocalypse: instead of promoting individualism and survivalism, they advocate mutual assistance, cultural resilience, South-South transnational solidarities, and Indigenous women’s leadership. Drawing upon their experience resisting both nuclear colonialism and carbon imperialism, Pacific storytellers offer compelling narratives to nurture the land and each other in times of global environmental collapse.

A collection of previously published poems by renowned National Book Award-winning Chamoru poet Craig Santos Perez. The seventh book from award-winning Chamoru author Craig Santos Perez, Mutiny brings together poems that were originally published in journals and anthologies from 2008 to 2023. Throughout these selected poems, Perez offers critical explorations of native cultures, decolonial politics, colonial histories, and the entangled ecologies of his homeland of Guam, his current home of Hawaiʻi, and the larger Pacific region in relation to the Global South and the Indigenous Fourth World. Perez's poetry draws on the power of storytelling to share Indigenous history and culture and to offer healing from the trauma of colonialism and injustice. As he writes, "If we can write the ocean, we will never be silenced."

This book helps readers make sense of the scope and complexity of the relationships between poetry and politics since 1900.

Unpapered is a collection of personal narratives by Indigenous writers exploring the meaning and limits of Native American identity beyond its legal margins. Native heritage is neither simple nor always clearly documented, and citizenship is a legal and political matter of sovereign nations determined by such criteria as blood quantum, tribal rolls, or community involvement. Those who claim a Native cultural identity often have family stories of tenuous ties dating back several generations. Given that tribal enrollment was part of a string of government programs and agreements calculated to quantify and dismiss Native populations, many writers who identify culturally and are recognized as Native Americans do not hold tribal citizenship. With essays by Trevino Brings Plenty, Deborah Miranda, Steve Russell, and Kimberly Wieser, among others, Unpapered charts how current exclusionary tactics began as a response to "pretendians"--non-indigenous people assuming a Native identity for job benefits--and have expanded to an intense patrolling of identity that divides Native communities and has resulted in attacks on peoples' professional, spiritual, emotional, and physical states. An essential addition to Native discourse, Unpapered shows how social and political ideologies have created barriers for Native people truthfully claiming identities while simultaneously upholding stereotypes.

The Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics offers comprehensive coverage of the vital and growing movement of ecopoetics. This volume begins with a general introduction to the field, followed by six sections: Perspectives: broad overviews engaging fields such as biosemiosis, kinship praxis, and philosophical approaches; Experiments: formal innovations developed by poets in response to planetary crises; Earth and Water: explorations of poetic entanglement with planetary chemical and biological systems; Waste/Toxicity/Precarity: poetics addressing the effects of pollution and climate change; Environmental Justice and Activism: examinations of poetry as an engine of political and cultural change; Region and Place: an international array of traditional and contemporary geographically focused responses to ecosystems and environmental conditions; and Subjectivities/Affects/Sexualities: investigations of gender, ethnicity, and race as they intersect with ecological concerns. Each section includes an overview and summary addressing the specific essays in the section. These previously unpublished essays represent a wide variety of nationalities, backgrounds, perspectives, and critical approaches exploring the interdisciplinary field of ecopoetics. Contributions from leading scholars working across the globe make The Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics a landmark textbook and reference for a variety of researchers and students.