The Poetry Project Newsletter Reviews Book Series by Craig Santos Perez, from unincorporated territory

All four books by poet Craig Santos Perez—titled from unincorporated territory, with varying subtitles—are reviewed by Timothy Otte for the current issue of The Poetry Project Newsletter. "They reference, reframe, and revise one another, in a postmodern project with a sense of history—poetic and otherwise," writes Otte. More:

...Perez’s project is complex, layered, and shifting. It’s a work of activism, history and archiving, and through it all, a carefully composed work sensitive to a poetic history. Just as each book is positioned as part of a larger work, so too is each poem. In [hacha], every poem is titled “from”: “from tidelands,” “from aerial roots;” “from ta(la)ya.” Like the books themselves, the poems are excerpts from longer works, even if they can stand on their own. In the second book, [saina], Perez introduces a new word, “ginen,” which functions in the same way. By [guma’] and [lukao], “ginen” is used in every poem, with the exception of a prose series called “from the legends of juan malo (a malologue).” This shift feels typical of Perez’s project: a word, phrase, image, or fact, or story is introduced and then returns later in new contexts until it’s simply a given.

Perez’s work with typography and layout further compounds his postmodernist leanings. Employing everything from struck-through text, footnotes, gray (rather than black) text, bold text, italics, and unconventional punctuation, these poems are explosive on the page, surprising the reader at every turn...

Find the full review at the PPNL.