Isthmus to Abya Yala

"Praise for Roberto Harrison: ""What Roberto Harrison accomplishes within these pages of Abya Yala is not some super-imposed current but fiery liquefaction that ignites transparency as alchemic kinetic.""—Will Alexander, author of Divine Blue Light (for John Coltrane) “Roberto Harrison is a visionary . . . one who sees beyond ordinary reality, and further he has the skill to transmit these visions . . . .”—Julian Talamantez Brolaski, author of Of Mongrelitude “I am incredibly thankful for this new book of poetry, prose, and drawing from the great Latino surrealist and one of the most generous and generative voices in poetry today, Roberto Harrison. In Tropical Lung, Harrison redoubles his commitment to sewing together the animal, the land, the human, the climate, and the technological.”—Gabriel Ojeda-Sague, author of Losing Miami  “To play the poems of Tropical Lung inside yourself, to ingest its program, is to open a promise that, like Macutté Mong who drew the colonizers’ executionary axe from out his head, we might ‘abolish the binary hatchet’ disturbing ourselves and cultures towards destruction, and live instead in Mabila, in a ‘multiplicity of interface,’ in a posthuman imaginary, as Tecs in Tecumsah’s republic. Harrison’s recent books construct together a hugely ambitious visionary poetics of the Americas . . . I can’t sufficiently stress how much we need what Harrison’s writing dreams.”—Lewis Freedman, author of Residual Synonyms for the Name of God  “Harrison’s Tropical Lung is a shock of breath in the hemispheric heat. Each word is a sleepless, gasping shadow of the metamorphoses happening in the poet’s bones and the continent’s convulsions.”—Edgar Garcia, author of Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography  “Harrison is a master.”—Peter O’Leary, author of The Sampo  “In the great tradition of Latin American poets who’ve striven to sensually and intelligently sing of the terrible passage to regeneration, Harrison (adept and hip to that tradition) adds a new element: memory buffer overrun of historical consciousness.”—Rodrigo Toscano, author of The Cut Point  “Roberto Harrison is a terrific poet. There is an underpinning of Mesoamerican shamanism to his work. Animals show up as spirit-doubles, plants dwell in their own conscious reality. . . . You never know if you are going to tip into vision or madness or some deeper state of mind. . . . The poems make me feel like a citizen of the archaic, the real world where all things are dancing, loud with significance.”—Andrew Schelling, author of A Possible Bag "