Böcker av Roberto Harrison

A conjuration of ancient consciousness aimed at rehumanizing our contemporary cyborg condition. "Referring to the American continent, 'Abya Yala' ('land of life') is a pre-Columbian term of the Guna people of Panamá and Colombia. Harrison wrestles with language, racism, and humanity in political and spiritual poems."-Publishers Weekly, Most Anticipated Poetry Books, Spring 2024"Abya Yala"-"land of life" or "land of vital blood"-is a Pre-Columbian term of the Guna people of Panamá and Colombia to refer to the American continent and more recently has signified the idea of a decolonized "New World" among various Indigenous movements. In Isthmus to Abya Yala, Panamanian American poet Roberto Harrison summons a mythic consciousness in response to this political and spiritual struggle. In his poems, with mystic fervor, Harrison finds phonetic unities concealing conceptual oppositions he must transcend. Invoking "mobilian" as an ur-language against racism and toward an all-inclusive humanity-in opposition to the "mobile" of phone-mediated existence-the poems of Isthmus to Abya Yala burn with a visionary ardor that overpowers rationality through an intensive accumulation of imagery. They even sometimes manifest as visual poems in the form of drawings he calls "Tecs," opposing the dominance of technology to the advocacy of pan-Indian nationhood by 19th century Shawnee leader Tecumseh. "Tecumseh Republic" is the poet's name for a new post-racial, post-national, post-binary, post-colonial, holistic and earth-oriented society with no national borders, with Panamá, the isthmus, as its only entry and exit.

"These are writings and drawings from and to a new homeland, a new homeland of Panamâa that can be transmitted through the quantum martyrs beyond life and death, and/or a new homeland of the Tecumseh Republic, where technology grows to be necessary in understanding the ancient as well as then becoming erased and transcended by a now ever present electronic circle. It is a book brought close to the earth in its symbolic springs, to the light filled mystery that began with countering disassociation and by repairing a devastating explosion of interior structures necessary to being a person in the most foundational ways. It is where the screen removes itself by song as we move toward kinship beyond color mark"--