A collection of serial poems,
Think of Lampedusa addresses the 2013 shipwreck that killed 366 Africans attempting to migrate secretly to Lampedusa, an Italian island in the Mediterranean Sea. The crossing from North Africa to this island and other Mediterranean way stations has become the most dangerous migrant route in the world. Interested in what is producing such epic displacement, Josué Guébo’s poems combineelements of history and mythology.
Guéboconsiders the Mediterranean not only as a literal space but also as a space of expectation, anxiety, hope, and anguish for migrants. Hemeditates onthe long history of narratives and bodies trafficked across the Mediterranean Sea. What did it—and what does it—connect and separate? Whose sea is it? Ultimately he is searchingfor what motivates a person to become part of what he calls a “seasonal suicide epidemic.”
This translation of Guébo’s <
Trade Review“Defiantly elegant. It is elegy and evocation, a summoning of the dead as a chorus speaking to those who do not see, or do not care, to remind them of the consciousness of Earth and of history’s will to life, and the ordering of change. . . . The poet’s hand is essential to our redemption.”—Afaa M. Weaver, author of
The Plum Flower Dance and
Multitudes “I can’t help but be moved by this large ambition of Josué Guébo, by his impossible task of bringing together poetics as different as those of Whitman and Mallarmé, by his huge desire to give a voice to those who cannot speak for themselves and
also to find the secret of lyric utterance.”—Ilya Kaminsky, author of
Dancing in Odessa and
Musica HumanaTable of ContentsIntroduction by John Keene
Translator’s Note
Think of Lampedusa
Notes
