From Unincorporated Territory [åmot]

"Perez uses this volume of poetry, his fifth in the unincorporated territory series, to ponder what healing looks like. What medicine can serve as a remedy for post-colonialism, environmental and climate collapse, rising extremism, and late-stage capitalism? Perez seems to offer answers in community, heritage, connection . . . He alternates a softer yearning for family and community with nods to the fraught legacy of Guåhan’s colonization. It’s a powerful framework, this back and forth — this poetry both slaps and slaps back: Rice becomes a motif, but so does rampant abuse at the hands of the Catholic church; so does military destruction. In this way, the work of remembering, of holding together the collective experience of trauma, becomes an active practice." * Vox *
"Perez's ongoing project is one of the longest-running and most rewarding literary engagements with Pacific Islander and Indigenous poetics of the twenty-first century." * Booklist starred review *
"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). . . . 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." * Harriet *
"A rich and expansive collection of fragments, fractals, family stories and archival material, from unincorporated territory [åmot] holds elegies for the past and present around a land and people still in flux; of occupation and mourning, loss and family, flora and fauna, documenting the visual literacies of an island and its people, examining what erodes and what holds, and what might already be lost." * rob mclennan's blog *
“Perez continues to expand visual literacies of Pacific literature as he grapples with the question: what does it mean to write the ocean? Here are handwoven, blessed nets of intergenerational Chamoru stories. If a poem could unstitch a barbed wire fence, throw net, play bingo, unshipwreck Indigenous youth, care for elders, or heal a broken heart with Spam, that poem is in these pages. Propelled by gratitude, this book is a call to defy and protect, a sea of poetic innovation and care.” -- No'u Revilla, author of Ask the Brindled
“In from unincorporated territory [åmot], Perez sings down healing for the speaker who asks, ‘isn’t that too / what it means to be / a diasporic chamorus