Tidal

A powerful debut. Poetry that lifts from the ocean's depth.

Amari Utomo grieves the loss of the sea. Words, wave-like, locate and dislocate at once, pushing against the shorelines of meaning or submerging the voice where language estranges itself from its moorings. Utomo's free verse emphasizes at once how difficult, and how necessary, it is for us to imagine our world as a system whose ecologies and cultures require us to care for all their interdependent parts. Formed in the sonic depth of poets Valentine Penrose, Arthur Sze, Rae Armantrout, and Braulio Arenas, Utomo's transcendent fragments mourn the calving glaciers, the bleaching coral, the loss of sea life, and, in doing so, invites us to be alert to our own flow and fragility.