Posts tagged SEEDBANK SERIES
Jack Remick reviews "Slow Now With Clear Skies" by Julene Tripp Weaver

There are moments in this volume, dominated by sickness of time and virus, when Weaver transcends the “easy way of death” to land in profound instants of insight. Those moments grace this collection, not with the expected lamentations of loss and death, but a greater depth—perhaps, even, grace beyond death.

Here the verse is clean, sharp and pure as the poet uses ordinary language to say extraordinary things. There is much Imagism in Weaver’s poetry—Imagism : “saying what you mean in the fewest and clearest words.”

While Weaver never fully abandons the purely experiential—and this volume is built on the personal—she leads us past the lyric of lamentations and into the epic of our own battles as humans to survive.

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Nina Burokas Reviews "How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems" by Mikeas Sánchez

It was with this awareness that I celebrate Milkweed Edition’s Seedbank Series, and, in this review, Mikeas Sánchez’s How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems. The thirty-eight poems in this collection are drawn from the author’s six prior publications, dating from 2006-2019. The author both wrote and translated the poems in those bilingual—Zoque and Spanish—publication. How to Be a Good Savage is trilingual, making the poems accessible to English readers for the first time.

Sánchez is a member of the Mokaya people, Indigenous to the state of Chiapas, Mexico. Her native language, Zoque, is a branch of the Mixe-Zoquean languages of Southern Mexico. Translators Wendy Call and Shook note that Sánchez now writes primarily in Zoque; specifically, the regional Copainalá variant of Zoque, an endangered language. The author states that “[being] an Indigenous writer in Mexico is an act of protest, an act of cultural and linguistic resistance.” Indeed, Sánchez’s activism—as a poet, as a radio producer, as a translator and developer of elementary school curricula—has been a significant contributor to the survival of her native language and the associated culture.

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