from unincorporated territory [åmot]
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). Each collection in the series is titled from unincorporated territory, followed by a Chamoru word cupped inside square brackets, distinct but not closed off from the English legalese preceding it. 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.
Like the books before it, Perez’s latest plays endlessly resourceful variations on a theme. But it’s also an herbarium, an heirloom, an archive of native origins and endangered practices. [åmot] has its title word every which way—its subjects include self-care, reparations, grandparental wisdom, wildlife conservation, inter-island solidarity, and even a personal conversion from the village Catholic church’s “åmen” to the randomized “åmot” of the community center next door:
i no longer attend mass
yet here i am praying
to the patron saint of bingo
please call your fateful combination
of letters & numbers
However far Perez ranges, he ends most poems by identifying a medicinal plant twice over, first in Chamoru and then with its scientific name: “[luluhot : maytenus thompsonii].”
Completists of from unincorporated territory will find familiar techniques reprised: sentences rotated and printed backward, archipelagoes of graphemes in white-space seas, makeshift diagrams like one “gastro-map aka the holy trinity of canned meats aka the chamoru food pyramid aka the micronesian triangle.” (The holy trinity? Spam, Vienna Sausage, Corned Beef.) But with its thematic commitment to preserving traditions and repairing narratives, [åmot] may be the series’ most welcoming book to date. “tell our stories,” Perez’s grandfather advises: “no one can take our stories away from us.” In a litany of “100 healing rituals for chamorus suffering from homesickness & diaspora,” Perez keeps the family tradition alive: “78. Read my poetry books (no refunds).”