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ISBN: 978-1-62557-078-9

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Categories Immigrant Writing Series, Poetry

Caulbearer

Name: Caulbearer
SKU: 978-1-62557-078-9
Availability: InStock

Luisa A. Igloria

Publication Date: August 16, 2024

Description

Caulbearer by Luisa A. Igloria is the third selection for the Black Lawrence Immigrant Writing Series.

In many cultures, a caul is considered talismanic; and a child born with it, possessing luck or protection. Luisa A. Igloria invokes this metaphor to weave poems exploring the veiled intervals of transition experienced by those in the diaspora—or by anyone who has felt a severing from their origins. The poems in Caulbearer enter spaces not only of nostalgia, loss, and impossible return. They also offer opportunities for glimpsing pleasure in the re-imagining and telling of our own stories, for as long and as many times as we need, in a world still full of beauty and mystery.

Praise

In this rapturous collection, Luisa A. Igloria maps sacred ecologies, violent histories, extracted geologies, and multispecies relations. Throughout, there is both praise and grief, as well as a desire to mouth nostalgia and feel the world before it is indelibly changed. Caulbearer invites us to witness the “unbearable cascade of beauty,” from the celestial birth and death of stars to the yucca moth laying eggs inside a flower. These poems reckon a salty truth: “we don’t know how long the world can hold / such specimens of tenderness.”
— Craig Santos Perez

I count Luisa A. Igloria among a select tribe of memorializers who understand that the crepe myrtle and Bathala are chromatic kin. Caulbearer fuses the cosmic, the ecological, and the colonial, to give us a courageous meditation on the crises of beginnings and endings. “For now, this certainty…” the poet generously gestures. Whether the rambutan’s diastole, the fragrance of highland pine, or the motherly communion of sea and moon, these poems are a tender offering in the tumult of our time.
— Patrick Rosal

In these remarkable poems, Luisa A. Igloria honors the gifts of nature and the chance to explore the fullness of our lives in partnership with the natural world even while lamenting the inevitability of its loss. Underscoring this environmental pain is the colonial harm enacted to a place and its people, to the land and the sea; all the while, the earth becomes a vessel for the grief we leave behind. Igloria perceptively threads past, present, and future—rich and beautifully textured—to humble us to the fragility of our existence.
— Mai Der Vang

About the Author

Luisa A. Igloria

Luisa A. Igloria is the recipient of the Immigrant Writing Series Prize from Black Lawrence Press for Caulbearer (2024) and was one of 2 Co-Winners of the 2019 Crab Orchard Poetry Prize for Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Southern Illinois University Press, fall 2020). In 2021, the Writers Union of the Philippines (UMPIL) conferred on her the Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas lifetime achievement award in the English poetry category. In 2015, she was the inaugural winner of the Resurgence Prize (UK), the world's first major award for ecopoetry, selected by former UK Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. Former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey selected her chapbook What is Left of Wings, I Ask as the 2018 recipient of the Center for the Book Arts Letterpress Poetry Chapbook Prize. During her term as 20^thPoet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020-22), Emerita, the Academy of American Poets awarded her one of twenty-three Poet Laureate Fellowships in 2021, to support a program of public poetry projects.

Other works include The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2018), Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (2014 May Swenson Prize, Utah State University Press), and 10 other books. She is lead editor, along with co-editors Aileen Cassinetto and Jeremy S. Hoffman, of Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States (Paloma Press, September 2023). Her poems are widely published and appear in national and international anthologies, print and online literary journals including The Georgia Review, Orion, Shenandoah, Cincinnati Review, The Common, Indiana Review, Crab Orchard Review, Diode, Missouri Review, Rattle, Poetry East, Cha, and others. Luisa served as the inaugural Glasgow Visiting Writer in Residence at Washington and Lee University in 2018.

Luisa also leads workshops at and serves on the board of The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk. She is a Louis I. Jaffe Professor and University Professor of English and Creative Writing, and a member of the core faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University, which she directed from 2009-2015. Since 2010, she has been writing (at least) a poem a day. www.luisaigloria.com

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