Yolandi E Cruz Guerrero 

Jan 31, 2017

In this collection, the sense of place has shifted or taken on life in the eyes of the poet. Talk about the place, the meaning of it to the speaker, the way the images make it specific.

new poetic slang for us 

gave me floor: 

to ground by breaking through the concrete of a persons emotions. in order words, to be delivered, or to be centered, or asked the hard question you know you should of have been answering all along. can be used in these ways, 

“gurlll, that poem gave me floor”

“you floor me”

“your piece gave me floor, now i feel like i am not alone in this!”

"no one leaves home until 

home is a sweaty voice 

in your ear

saying-

leave,” 

— Warsan Shire 

This weeks collection of poems and essays engage the idea of home within the context of different political moments in different nations across the globe. And in talking about a home a poet can come to find themselves moving in ward onto themselves while they survive the shifting times. There is a clear opposition, a nation who has claimed power and has a created a system to dehumanize bodies, of course by their chosen specificity. The benefit of using exploring home with poetry is that it makes one have to make it specific. Home is defined by their life and vice versa. What I feel like talking about home allows for is to not just mark the difference that started a war but what came first genocide or war? What I am trying to say is: the pieces we read for this week implicates us in this question, will we recognized genocide in the context of war or war in row context of genocide. In other word, this distinction matters because what it is really asking is, which made you loose home first?

Reading these poems, along the reality of our todays made my mind spin. From “god save america” to “a stranger becomes afraid” (Youssef)  these poems gave me floor because they remind me that“the other is that that is not me”(Mullen).

  The invocation of place becomes a site to render context, to tell the other side of the story, to say that maybe it was not the sword of the colonizer that came first but that of the indigenous. In order for that reclaiming to occur, in order to invoke place as a mechanism to actually into time. Rosal wrote: “One way to erase an island is to invent /a second island absolved of all the sounds /the first one ever made” (Rosal). Rosal, along with other poets from this selections, do the work that time inevitably requires us to do: to reimagining the past by slowing down the present. In a way, it becomes clear to me that the work of a poet is to invent sound. In another note, Rosal makes a salient point, that the work of finding shouldn't be the work the work of erasing, but that even labeling it as finding is an act of erasure. It sets a crucial distinction between an indigenous body/immigrant away from settlers/colonizers. These pieces are records of the consequences of the desire to find (&steal/hoard resources) . I once had a teacher come in to class quietly and write on the board: “We are here because they were there”. This phrase has always stuck with me. I am a transnational body, I am an immigrant. I make this connection here because it is apart of the consequences of these piece of people that had war, the they’s come into their life and that always has set of motions that follow. 

There is a kind of dignity that is expressed in these piece where the characters in the poems do not reported on they’re witnessing in testimony(poetry) but that that exact condition, whether that be it living through war or have war be a constant attack on your body, is what brings you into a state of grace. Brings to say perhaps: “no fear of the wolves of the wild /no fear, for the land is my land” (Youssef). Suffering offers a kind of grace that black bodies can articulate in a very particular way because of the history they embody. Youssef wrote: “I am not your foe/I do not need your day of doom” Youssef, 197. Youssef makes one thing clear, regardless of what came first, genocide and war are choices that were made. The disunity that is woven through this collection lies in a deep understating of grace. That grace is never about the other person, grace is about us deserving it. About that liberation, that ultimate sovereignty. Grace is love in its ultimate form.