A masterful collection of poems rooted in K’iche’ Maya culture illustrating all the ways meaning manifests within our world, and how best to behold it.
“My language was born among trees, / it holds the taste of earth; / my ancestors’ tongue is my home.” So writes Humberto Ak’abal, a K’iche’ Maya poet born in Momostenango, in the western highlands of Guatemala. A legacy of land and language courses through the pages of this spirited collection, offering an expansive take on this internationally renowned poet’s work.
Written originally in the Indigenous K’iche’ language and translated from the Spanish by acclaimed poet Michael Bazzett, these poems blossom from the landscape that raised Ak’abal—mountains covered in cloud forest, deep ravines, terraced fields of maize. His unpretentious verse models a contraconquista—counter-conquest—perspective, one that resists the impulse to impose meaning on the world and encourages us to receive it instead. “In church, ” he writes, “the only prayer you hear / comes from the trees / they turned into pews.” Every living thing has its song, these poems suggest. We need only listen for it.
Attuned, uncompromising, Ak’abal teaches readers to recognize grace in every earthly observation—in the wind, carrying a forgotten name. In the roots, whose floral messengers “tell us / what earth is like / on the inside.” Even in the birds, who “sing in mid-flight / and shit while flying.” At turns playful and pointed, this prescient entry in the Seedbank series is a transcendent celebration of both K’iche’ indigeneity and Ak’abal’s lifetime of work.
Giới thiệu về tác giả
Michael Bazzett is the author of The Echo Chamber, as well as five other collections of poems, including The Interrogation and You Must Remember This, winner of the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry. He is also the translator of The Popol Vuh, which was long-listed for the National Translation Award and named one of the best books of poetry in 2018 by the New York Times. Bazzett is a poet, teacher, and 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Guernica, Virginia Quarterly Review, Copper Nickel, The Rumpus, and Best New Poets. He lives in Minneapolis.
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