Isthmus to Abya Yala

A conjuration of ancient consciousness aimed at rehumanizing our contemporary cyborg condition. "Referring to the American continent, 'Abya Yala' ('land of life') is a pre-Columbian term of the Guna people of Panam and Colombia. Harrison wrestles with language, racism, and humanity in political and spiritual poems."Publishers Weekly, Most Anticipated Poetry Books, Spring 2024 Abya Yalaland of life or land of vital bloodis a Pre-Columbian term of the Guna people of Panam and Colombia to refer to the American continent and more recently has signified the idea of a decolonized New World among various Indigenous movements. In Isthmus to Abya Yala, Panamanian American poet Roberto Harrison summons a mythic consciousness in response to this political and spiritual struggle. In his poems, with mystic fervor, Harrison finds phonetic unities concealing conceptual oppositions he must transcend. Invoking mobilian as an ur-language against racism and toward an all-inclusive humanityin opposition to the mobile of phone-mediated existencethe poems of Isthmus to Abya Yala burn with a visionary ardor that overpowers rationality through an intensive accumulation of imagery. They even sometimes manifest as visual poems in the form of drawings he calls Tecs, opposing the dominance of technology to the advocacy of pan-Indian nationhood by 19th century Shawnee leader Tecumseh. Tecumseh Republic is the poets name for a new post-racial, post-national, post-binary, post-colonial, holistic and earth-oriented society with no national borders, with Panam, the isthmus, as its only entry and exit.