Bøger udgivet af Inlandia Institute

Total magnificence. Multi-sensory voyager - sculptor of love and painter of concept and delirium, a choreographer of space and a duende-splicer between Baudelaire, Lorca and Strauss. Angela is somewhere in there, cinematic; a Casanova pin-stripe suit, then a fl aring thigh, then a topaz sari. I fi nd Peñaredondo a most accomplished poet, a devouring mind and most of all, a deep, intimate observer touching the big bright, dark worlds - their wounds and miracles. She says, "I want to be that kind / who walks through a wall of fi fty lives." Indeed she possesses this kind of power. A genius at work. - Juan Felipe Herrera Poet Laureate of the United States Angela Peñaredondo's powerful debut, All Things Lose Thousands of Times, is a luminous and timely book of migratory poetics that gathers in the body, no matter how impossibly marooned, the mouth of the lyric I. Drawn from the compression of loss, "...beyond the clenched doors, the perfume / of starved fl owers." Peñaredondo's speaker seeks in the "...web of wetness, what...has been written out." The poet's collapsing of cultural dimensions into the weight of traveling through an embodied history and present reveals an urgent landscape (of war, of art, of nature, of people) of the inevitable and the incommensurable: "I'd rather be whoever bathes / in the monsoon, knees swaying- / unequaled. Wanting allows gospel..." Peñaredondo's truth brilliantly explores precariousness, revealing the need to move at its edges, and to escape, into "husk" and "crystalline pictograph"-"I came back not to regret / or ask the particulars why I left. / When a tree falls, its roots / aim jagged, pointing / in all directions..." - Ronaldo Wilson Author of Farthest Traveler The poems in All Things Lose Thousands of Times aptly tell a transnational coming of age story, a becoming from the savage and the fertile, the urban and the fantastic, where "heaven comes after collision." This is a stunning debut for Peñaredondo, poems that shimmer with dense and riveting lyricism. - Carmen Giménez Smith Author of Milk and Filth

Birth certificates, passports, citizenship papers: these are the documents that define our official identities, that make us legible to the apparatus of the state. For Asian Americans, such documents are often central to our family narratives, marking a history of migration, departure and arrival, rejection or belonging. Yet we are also well aware of what such official documents erase, enforce, or repress. Kenji Liu's Map of an Onion begins with a reflection on the role of such documents in shaping identity but the mapping Liu offers us in this collection rejects the sharp boundaries of the official cartographer. Instead, Map of an Onion is a border-crossing, coalitional text that finds its political voice in interruption. In Liu's poetics, family history structures, and is structured by, histories of migration, colonialism, and violence, yet Liu finds in the interstices of those structures a space of profoundly personal exploration. "Tell me how to say your name," he asks us, "because / documents won't protect us." -- Timothy Yu, Author, 100 Chinese Silences and Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965 One way to read Map of an Onion is as a quest myth for the contemporary self-discovering, revealing, asking deeper, inquiring layer by layer toward the onion's core, which is, ironically, unlocatable. Self as sensorium of perception, self as "animal, bird," as family member, as the inheritor of eight centuries of Liu heritage, self as man, as Japanese-Chinese-Taiwanese-American living on borrowed Lenape Native land in a suburb of New Jersey, self as unstable construct, as citizen, diplomat, flaneur, saboteur, artist, as tech-savvy, code-switching trans-lingual being. Kenji Liu's illuminated Map of an Onion is a koan of deconstructions which interrogates within the fissures of difference those spaces within us and between us, as charged spaces of potential and becoming. A booklength question in a hard, graceful calligraphy, asking deeper, asking better, what does it mean to be a self, this Self, to "translate this search / between my family's four languages,"-emergent, reassembled of ancient molecules and sculpted by all the forces of culture, history and bloodlight into a man? If "nations need a parable to reinvent themselves," Map of an Onion may be that parable. -- Chad Sweeney, Hillary Gravendyk Prize Judge