Village

Praise for Village

“Diggs has found ways to sing out through hardship. . . . This is a dazzling and impressive work.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“The macaronic poems in Village . . . revel in cacophonous cascades of raucous soundplay and the visual arrangement of linguistic fragments from over a half-dozen languages—primarily Tsalagi (Cherokee) and Portuguese, but also German, Latin, Arabic, Quechua, Diné, and Yoruba—which litter the page in crisscrossing zig-zags and rigid squares, like city blocks. . . . Unconventional choices add to the originality of Diggs’s composition, which borrows from public and visual arts in exciting ways.” —Diego Báez, Poetry Foundation

“Part instruction manual, part celebration, part dance party, part garden tour, Village refuses compartmentalization, demanding engaged and engaging ways of looking at and talking about difficult shared experiences. . . . These poems by LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs reveal the richly diverse ecosystem of what a limited imagination might sideline as a ‘marginalized’ life.” —Camille Dungy, Orion Magazine

“LaTasha out here singing in tongues again, and I gotta sing her praises. This Village is a family history, a biomythography, a sensory tsunami: a documentary poetics composed in the languages Diggs needed to get at her truth, all of them getting stretched, chopped, spat, crooned, and retuned to a lower frequency. Hard, tender, witty, and elegiac, these fully populated poems are portraits of the human condition—and the conditions that shape and haunt some humans more than others.” —Evie Shockley

“Buzzing with song-sound, poetic music, multiple languages, mad word love, intergenerational multiplicities of wisdom and harm, constant rearrangement of and searching for formal expansion that can channel all of it into shapes that keep moving, all these lives on the line, proposals and testimony and lists and saved documents—Village is a vast, searing, funny, and ultimately incredible book.” —Anselm Berrigan

“In Diggs’s hands, under her bone plectrum, which seems plucked from the Milky Way at night, sound becomes pliant, extensive, ecstatic, specific, omnilinguistic, sluicing, and moody. Sound reveals and conceals its faces, calls for and sends away its devotees, entails a velvety fabric that can be seamed, stitched, furled, unfurled, burnt till it converts to sight and smell, melts, wicks out. Scatters. Swerves to the verge. The term 'virtuosic' seems too mean and stingy for the magnitude of Diggs’s star.” —Joyelle McSweeney