“Whereas José Martí left Cuba for New York and imagined a hemispheric America that bridged North and South, Olivares summons “a botanical / no-américa” that is neither north nor south but rather “botanic imaginings” of how “our américa built itself inside of us.” Future Botanic is a dissident queer love song to “this dirt of the américas,” from the ancestors’ journey from Cuba to Harlem, to a Bronx housing project, to the touch of a lover’s hand, to the dead we carry with us and the infinite desires and dreams burbling just below “our lit tongues.” Words here are compressed into prose blocks or unspool on the page in flowing tercets that reveal a restless, genderless mind traveling inward to where the “I” is “a blade / of unused womb.” For Olivares, writing is a diasporic act of naming the violences of empire (and our complicity with them). She insists on poetry as a radically speculative practice of summoning “our multiversed futurities,” and we are lucky to have such a healing ecology of language: “For the seeds we are, fed on dreaming.” —Urayoán Noel
NO MAP OF THE EARTH INCLUDES STARS
Winner of the 2014 Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize
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“Read this book aloud and remember how, through one’s life, we often lay awake through nights, walk eagerly through our days, looking for answers to echo back with the honesty of Christina Olivares’ No Map of the Earth Includes Stars. Turn off the news on your local channel; the story behind the news speaks here with a 'grasp at the fading bright thing—the fading song…you are changed forever….' And we’re changed for the better. This is the kind of collection you’ll read multiple times, hoping the wisdom will sink in, and then you’ll seek others who know that the ‘mind unfolds/ expands/ falls away, a star.’”— A. VAN JORDAN
"White, Black, Puerto Rican, everybody just a-freakin, and this non-Cuban’s just a-groovin’ to Olivares’s syncopated dictations and lyric visions and poetic prose blocks, which redraw diasporic maps as palimpsests (as in how the poem “Palimpsest” answers its “City beckoned. To be come a new home” with “Reality laid over reality until nothing is whole any longer”). This call-and-response extends, over several poems, into a conversation with Babalú-Ayé, the Orisha (syncretized with Saint Lazarus) of the healing of the Earth. Against the legacy of 1898 and its juridical maps, where Cuba is just one more pawn of empire, Olivares offers a spiritual map attuned to “the memory of my hands moving through the carcasses of others’ prayers.”—URAYOÁN NOEL
FUTURE BOTANIC
Available here through Get Fresh Books!
“In Future Botanic, Christina Olivares continues her interrogation of inheritance, history, legacy, and queer love. From the Bronx to Cuba, Olivares' poems are lyrical meditations—in some cases, spells—that embody, vivify and reckon with the geography of the Americas and the centuries-long postcolonial condition.” - Publisher
“Christina Olivares is a sonic soothsayer on the page, yes! Olivares loves lush language & liminal space & has returned to the page with a curious ferocity for softness among the rubble. In Future Botanic, Olivares studies the archives of lineage, community, & her own body. Each poem an altar offering, each line-break an ancestor’s relinquishing. This collection is a spectrum of girl bliss & gender, concrete gardens & blood conjure, and is a spiritually (re)evolutionary promise. The “botanical no-américa, inverse” survives and revives us all.” —Mahogany L. Browne
“In Future Botanic Olivares writes "...the Bronx is a spell on us that we also make." Olivares is such a beautiful caster of spells that as readers we are transfixed by something beyond language —which, stunning in its own right, is still a slow second to her primal landscapes—her blossomed imagery. This collection succeeds in rooting itself in many spaces, queer and exact in its belonging and estrangement. “Imagine yourself free, safe and loved”—Olivares is a world builder without limits — her radical imagination, her keen seeing a blanket for hiding, for warmth, for living after liberation—” —Yesenia Montilla
"Christina Olivares' debut collection NO MAP OF THE EARTH INCLUDES STARS establishes her as one of the most adventurous young poets writing today. In probing, honest chronicles of imagined lives and lived situations across geographies, Olivares shines constellations of light on her vibrant experiences, in the mind and in the heart, in and out of this world. NO MAP OF THE EARTH INCLUDES STARS showcases the intermarry of a poet not so much pushing boundaries as transcending them." -- Publisher
“These are brave and searing poems, reconciling and healing deep divisions of mind, culture, spirit, lenguas – tongues, language. Gathering into herself “shards of angels,” the sky on fire, the sea’s “wept, wild singing,” a daughter petitions (pleads, prays, prepares a legal brief) for her paranoid, holy, homeless, violent, radiant, exiled family member. A woman weathers “the body’s thunderstorms,” love’s contradictions – “a river who flows against her own current;” presides heartachingly over the scene of instruction where children “learn what a border is” and are shown “no map of the world/ includes stars.”— L. S. ASEKOFF
