Caulbearer

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