Yaviza - Softcover

Poetry. Latinx Studies. YAVIZA, the title of Roberto Harrison's new book, is also the name of a small Panamanian jungle town with a declining population and a colonized history. YAVIZA marks the end of the Panamerican Highway and hence, perhaps, of U.S. imperialist influence. YAVIZA (the book) takes up a different journey-a vision quest of sorts-an act of liberatory re-enchantment. The poetry emerges out of personal, as well as political, struggle, and the book can be read as an ars poetica. But it is also a demonstration of the transformative power of language, liberated from the prosaic and wild with incantatory imagination, beckoning us into a world of "plural consciousness."

Roberto Harrison is the author of the poetry collections OS (subpress, 2006), Counter Daemons (Litmus Press, 2006), Bicycle (Noemi Press, 2015), Culebra (Green Lantern Press, 2016), BRIDGE OF THE WORLD (Litmus Press, 2017), and YAVIZA (Atelos, 2017) as well as of many poetry chapbooks. With Andrew Levy he edited Crayon magazine from 1997 to 2008. He is the Milwaukee Poet Laureate for 2017-2019 and is also a visual artist. He lives in Milwaukee.