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Today's poem is "Where the Seed Scattered"
from Maps for Migrants and Ghosts

Southern Illinois University Press

Luisa A. Igloria, originally from Baguio City, is the author of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Co-Winner, 2019 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Prize; Southern Illinois University Press, 2020), The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2018), and 12 other books. Luisa was the inaugural recipient of the 2015 Resurgence Poetry Prize (UK) for ecopoetry and is a Louis I. Jaffe Professor of English and Creative Writing in the MFA Program at Old Dominion University. She also leads workshops for The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk. In July 2020, she was appointed Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Other poems by Luisa A. Igloria in Verse Daily:
May 4, 2020:   "Migrant Letters" "Yes we are fierce, yes we take our..."


January 11, 2020:   "Ghazal, with Cow Burial" "Out of a pit, they've found a woman's bones..."

Books by Luisa A. Igloria:

Other poems on the web by Luisa A. Igloria:
Two poems
"Custody"
Fourteen poems
"Swarm Migration"
Seven poems
Two poems
Two poems
Ten poems
Three poems
"Dear Federico"

Luisa A. Igloria's Website.

Luisa A. Igloria According to Wikipedia.

Luisa A. Igloria on Twitter.

About Maps for Migrants and Ghosts:

"In the face of injustice, these poems urge us to 'say danger and defiance. / Not shoulder shrug, not fold over.' And perhaps it also becomes the task of the poet to reconcile where she can; to try to sweeten the life, past or present; to be the ginger flower whose 'torch burns with scent in the middle / of the garden. Not even the rain can put it out.' These poems are adamantine—dazzling and diamond-strong. In language at once keen and lulling, muscular and sumptuous, Igloria gives us a book of losses as well as recuperations."
—Claire Wahmanholm

"Restlessly transiting between the past and the present, homeland and diasporic home, consciousness and conscience, Luisa Igloria is our poet of the lyric cusp. In poems that deconstruct memory into its parts—complex nostalgia, bittersweet love—Maps for Migrants and Ghosts is at once gorgeous and painful. I read this book with intensity, feeling, in the words of one poem, 'ecstatic and furious.'"
—Rick Barot

"'It's telling, the things / we return to,' writes Luisa A. Igloria in this masterful new collection, where memory takes us on a journey that is full of music and wisdom. I opened this book on the poems about her mother and fell in love with this voice, one that has learned to be 'completely alone, even among others,' a voice that knows how to enter the dark and find music in it. This lyric record of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts is a journey both spiritual and personal, one that understands that at our most private we still live in history, yet finds, in the terrors of that history, a healing melody, a tune."
—Ilya Kaminsky

"Urgent yet delicate, Luisa A. Igloria's poetry excavates the rich material of the past. The poems fashion and refashion the self in flashes of dreams, apparitions of family long departed, and haunting regret. To cross the interstitial moments in these lyrical moments is to understand the losses one encounters when the world is leaving you behind. Yet in spite of the burdens catalogued in these remarkable poems, Igloria's power is in returning us to a residence in beauty when the voices of crickets return us to their scintillate choruses."
—Oliver de la Paz



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