Hello Good People,

I hope that you are finding ways to restore your energy, nourish, and care for yourself and each other in these times. May you be surrounded by all you need to create safe spaces for living, learning, and flourishing. Thank you for your readership. 

Just so you know, I’m a fan of public libraries and include links to books in the L.A. Public Library in my posts. If you live in different region, I hope that you can find the titles at your local library.

Let me first just say what is on my mind all the time. I want the immediate end to destruction, harm, suffering, and loss of life. The war machine is unethical and obsolete.

Finding Words

Sometimes words know exactly what they want to do on the page. A line will appear like taking dictation from the universe.

I walked along a mountain trail through an expanse of yellow California brittlebush. Words finally appeared inside when I passed the gnarled nopal. I stopped to jot them down.

“my parents named me ‘friend’ / in a language that never appeared in my heritage / placed me in the middle of a million wars / and asked me to speak.”

I saw the lines inside a charcoal sketch of a child surrounded by sharp markings and barriers. She was trying to summon language to stop the world from fighting. 

“Stop” is my poem for now. Just stop.

The name my parents gave me was an existential assignment. Create bonds of mutual affection. Befriend. 

Defining Your Own Normal

I’ve been thinking a lot about my father while I read through all the decisions from the International Criminal Court. He was the kind of guy who cared about ethics and jurisprudence as a social framework for justice. We would read Supreme Court cases together, and trace precedents as they applied to current day situations. In our conversations, he was the legalist and I was the culturalist. He’d argue for legal guidelines to defend innocents from corruption and abuse of power, and I would say that we also needed a just culture to enforce equality for all. Of course, we need both legal protections from tyranny and a culture of people who think and defend the values of interdependence, or what Thich Nhat Hanh called “interbeing.”

“There are hotheads everywhere,” Karim A.A. Kahn said this week in an interview. But “there are people who have fidelity to something greater than themselves.” We need high fidelity people in leadership now. We need to be high fidelity ourselves. “If we don’t apply the law equally,” Khan said, “we will disintegrate as a species.” 

We are working to create the possibility of peace, equality, and stability at a time when abnormal relations are the norm. In The Myth of Normal, physician Gabor Maté writes that “this is a socio-political moment that is typified by the spread of negativity, distrust, hostility, and polarization … Something is amiss in our culture itself.” Maté writes, “Our concept of well-being must move from the individual to the global.” 

Let’s create spaces for mutuality and well-being that reach from the personal to the planetary. Given my global familial ties and friendships, this is my natural direction.

El Mundo No Se Conoce / The World Doesn't Know Itself 

One unexpected blessing of the pandemic was being connected to global writing communities that tell stories in multiple languages. With 7000 living languages in the world, plurilingualism is the global norm, not the exception. The poems in Random Experiments in Bioluminescence play with multiple languages and places them beside each other in friendship.

In “Mixolydian,” words move from top to bottom, shuttling back and forth like on a loom. The poem weaves together a plurilingual conversation that concludes with the sound of color at the lowest point on Earth. In English, this body of water is called dead, but in Hebrew it is named for salt ים המלח and in Arabic it is البحر الميت.

Friends and family graciously translated my poems from the English, Spanish, or Portuguese to their mother tongues for the book. Readers will see the distinct letter forms, and listen to poems in an orality archive I am building for the book.

I’m grateful to everyone who has played with me in our grove of languages, poetry, and friendship. I want to introduce the guest translators to you, and will start here with poets Patron Henekou and Margarita de Leon. Patron writes and teaches in Togo, and we met through Writer’s Project Ghana. Margarita lives and writes in Mexico, and we met through poet Gloria Carrera. 

Patron Henekou translated my poem “What If I Were"?” into Ewe and French. Patron is a poet, playwright and cofounder of Festival International des Lettres et des Arts (nimblefeathers.com), an annual literature and arts festival at Université de Lomé, Togo, where he works as an Assistant Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing.

Margarita León translated my poem “What If I Were?” into Otomi/Hñähñu as ¿Nde Gra Bui Ngu Di Ne?" Margarita León es poeta y traductora otomí/hñähñu- español, ha publicado poesía en diversas antologías, revistas y suplementos culturales en México y en el extranjero. Su último poemario Ya pa otho ya xudi (El tiempo sin sombra) es parte de la colección Miguel León-Portilla de la editorial de la Universidad de Guadalajara UDG. Contacto: Facebook/Margarita León; hyatsiml@gmail.com

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On June 1 there will be a book launch for a new collection edited by Epifania Amoo-Adare and Rapti Lālana Siriwardane-de Zoysa called Rebel Wom!n: Anthology of Non-Conformism. This is a book of art, essays, poems, and stories to help us find new ways of being. I'm glad to have my work included in the volume with my family Reva Santo and Eilen Itzel Mena. The unsolicited response thus far has been impressive. 5.0 out of 5 stars / "Eye-opening and wonderful"

"In recent years, I often found myself thinking that the term feminism is overused and misunderstood. This book brings women from all around the globe, a variety of ethnic, cultural, and religious backgrounds together. Reading as they write in their poetic, analytical, or visionary voices, not from a commentator but an eyewitness viewpoint, not from a Western perspective only but a rich mix of international perspectives is eye-opening, inspiring, educational, and hopeful, all at the same time."

Gratitude

Thank you for reading, and I look forward to hearing from you with any comments you may have.

Random Experiments in Bioluminescence is available for pre-order, and I’ll keep you posted about book launch events in the months ahead. 

Be well, 

Amy