This is a slender volume of poems of great depth. Nevins braids themes of loss, grief and rage about the senseless loss of beautiful young people (including his beloved son) in wars that never end; historical conquest and current betrayal of indigenous peoples in the Americas; and cruel policies that cause the death of children today in immigrant detention camps. Sweat lodge incantations tell ancient stories of immigration, land theft, and the greed that drives wars for natural resources, and the legacy of curses that follow in the form of natural disasters.

Irish history with its own long sorrows also threads through Nevins’ work with allusions to Yeats and poems printed in Irish. Like all poetry, these poems should be read aloud to reveal their internal rhymes and the cadence of old oration as the poet writes of universal themes. Quiet declarations of truth are woven through these poems that urge us to live safe in “shared loving energy,” as Nevins puts it, not afraid of anything at all.

“Awe” is essential reading for this time of great unknowing and uncertainty, when truly we can live only in the present. In the title poem, Nevins reminds us that all the past is in the here, in this now.

Review submitted by Mary Dudley 

Kat Heatherington is a queer ecofeminist poet, sometime artist, pagan, and organic gardener. She lives south of Albuquerque New Mexico, in Sunflower River intentional community with a varying number of other humans and cats. Kat’s work primarily addresses the interstices of human relationships and the natural world. She has one previous book, The Bones of This Land, published in 2017 by Swimming with Elephants Publications and available at Bookworks and Harvest Moon Books in Albuquerque, as well as on amazon.com. She can be found online at https://patreon.com/yarrowkat and on instagram at @sometimesaparticle. You can contact the author at yarrow@sunflowerriver.org.

Though he lived only 38 years, Jan Slauerhoff (born in 1898 in Leeuwarden, the capitol of Friesland in The Netherlands, and died in 1936) is considered the only poete maudit of Holland in the 20th Century, a late Romantic poet influenced by Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Corbiere.

His first poem was published as a teenager in the communist magazine the Neeiuw Tijd. After university study of medicine in Amsterdam, he worked for the rest of his life as a ship’s doctor on different ships and therefore visited many different continents, including Asia, Africa and the Caribbean of the Americas.

His longing for the passionate love for a woman and his restlessness in being a wanderer at sea, with especial sympathy for the poor and the downtrodden, figure importantly in his poetry.

There’s a story doubtlessly true that toward the end of his life, he was on a boat in the China Sea where Chinese would row out to receive shots against typhoid and diphtheria from him. Two years before his death, his final book of poems, Soleares, was awarded the Van der Hoogt Prize in The Netherlands.

He was also the author of the romantic semi-documentary novel of the 16th century Portuguese poet Luis de Camoes with whom Slauerhoff deeply identified in The Forbidden Kingdom (1932), and Life on Earth (1934).

But it’s as a poet that Slauerhoff is most deeply remembered by the people of The Netherlands, for his embodiment of the themes of modern anxiety, and the home-away-from-home that his poems evoke. Indeed he was among the first European, African or American poets in the last century to write not simply of  but within the Orient, and many poems among the 31 here reflect that domain.

Querencia is a connection with land, and with water, which sustains life. It is a remembrance of one’s history; where one began. It calls upon a place of origin. Yet, it also transcends a want and desire for where our future will take us. Querencia is not grounded by the traditional concept of Aztlán, that of the U.S. Southwest. Rather, it follows the Latinx diaspora; wherever it lands, wherever it develops roots.This project builds upon the querencia developed from the historical knowledge and social factors regarding ethnic enclaves such as the immigrant neighborhood of Roosevelt Park along the Grandville Avenue “César E. Chávez Boulevard” Corridor in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Chicanos/as, exiled Cuban-Americans, Dominicans, and refugee Central Americans have reestablished their querencia in the Latinx diaspora within this barrio. Thus, Nuestros antepasados y la nueva generación en SW Michigan observes through photography and bilingual poetry how this West Michigan community represents its ‘latinidad’.