Las Palmas - by Keith Jones (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Poetry that seeks kinship and hopeful futures amid traumas of colonialism, displacement, and climate disaster.

The poems of Las Palmas conjure, walk beside, and tarry with the entangled grief of the long histories and violences in which we are all still embedded. Jones offers homage to the anguished beauties and truths that poet Jay Wright once said were "the disturbances" that "our ancestors create in us." Grounded in musicality and haptics, Las Palmas seeks to salvage and mend while meditating on materiality, loss, cartography, kinship, displacement, coloniality, the "modern" world, and climate disasters. Throughout this collection, Keith Jones finds truth and community amid despair and the cruelest of circumstances, working through traumatic intimacies and mapping new imaginaries.

Las Palmas is the winner of the 2023 Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest, selected by Brody Parrish Craig.

Review Quotes

"In the creativity of Las Palmas, we are invited to the crossroads of modal freedom both page-bound and blood oath. To a chronology of reckoning. Dreamscape is training ground; is theater of new form and decolonial instruction. A crossroads where alongside ancestry, a spear has a mathematics from the future; a dialogue in all epochs. This collection is a chronicle of a spirit casually transcendent."--Tongo Eisen-Martin, author of "Heaven Is All Goodbyes"

Las Palmas geographizes, topographizes, hydrologizes an/other set of memorious islands, steadily adrift. These poems, brimming with 'broken' syllables and single letters that question confident meaning-making and verse-reading, as archipelagoes also tend to do, craft a benthic map of unseen affective basins. Here, the insular body--both human and more-than-human--with its dense geological and material history of privations and accretions, comes to restless rest through movements at once wanted and forced. As with William Carlos Williams's indomitable mother from Mayagüez, the poet's madre, tía, hermanas, and abuela, to whom the book is dedicated, constitute an unshakeable chord, if not umbilical then submarinely mountainous, connecting Borikén's sovereign longing to that of all hyper-exploited islands refusing to forget--and to let go of each other."--Beatriz Llenín Figueroa, author of "Affect, Archive, Archipelago: Puerto Rico's Sovereign Caribbean Lives"

"Las Palmas is a [book] of immersion. Here, the poet weaves an intergenerational narrative of place and play that brings voice--no, chorus--to landscapes gathered in our midst. These poems speak in tongues both necessary and innovative, where language sparks a new world irresistibly familiar."--Brody Parrish Craig, judge of the 2023 Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest

About the Author

Keith Jones (he/him) is the author of Echo's Errand and the chapbooks blue lake of tensile fire; shorn ellipses; the lucid upward ladder; Fugue Meadow; and Surface to Air, Residuals of Basquiat. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Flag + Void, Harvard Review, SX Salon, Transition, Verse, and elsewhere. He teaches in the Africana Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston and is the current poet-in-residence at the New England Conservatory.