The poet did, however, include English translations in the Appendix. I am a tourist of the Miami that Ojeda-Sagué knows and loves so well I am not her native daughter. The poems are a mix of English and Spanish, which left this non-bilingual speaker feeling a bit unmoored. Rather, it’s a picture of how Ojeda-Sagué experienced it himself, a personal “hallucination” Over-dubbed.” This is not a total picture of the language spoken in Miami This life was folded, doubled, bent over, In the language ecosystem I grew up in: school in English, home in Spanish, the In the openingĮxplainer entitled “A Note on Language,” he writes that “ book is written That still looms large in the poet’s childhood memories. They collapse time, throwing into question whether, for example, the thousands of people described in “The Thousands”-“reflected or drowning, thousands are moving along a barbed line”-are those who are already missing in Florida due to recent hurricanes or the thousands more that will be lost in the destruction to come.Įlsewhere, it’s clear that the poems represent the Miami The poems are therefore tinged with sadness for what is almost certain to be lost: the city’s people, food, smells, sounds.Īt times it’s hard to discern whether the poems describe the city as it exists today or will be soon, a fitting quality given the unpredictable nature of climate change. Though Miami is still standing, experts agree that it’ll be one of the first cities in the United States to succumb to sea-level rise as a result of climate change. His formally inventive poems read like a requiem for the city he grew up in. The first is Losing Miami, an artful third collection by Chicago-based poet Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué. Two outstanding poetry collections about climate change hit shelves this month. Perhaps it will come as no surprise, then, that poets have begun to experiment with the subject, creating deeply affecting art out of questions over how and when to grieve, cope with loss, and create new paths forward. In its all-encompassing largeness it defies straightforward description, inspires awe and terror, and demands rumination on the past. There’s something like a perverse poetry to climate change. Subscribe to her monthly newsletter to get “Burning Worlds” and other writing about art and climate change delivered straight to your inbox. Burning Worlds is Amy Brady’s monthly column dedicated to examining trends in climate fiction, or “cli-fi,” in partnership with Yale Climate Connections.
0 kommentar(er)
