Beginning with a pair of elegies for the Chicano poet Alfred Arteaga, the three sequences making up terra terra speak to the loss and displacement of our times and the long history of colonial violence that has occasioned them. Drawing in part on the Tristia, the Roman poet Ovid’s lament for his colonial exile on the frontiers of the Roman imperium, the poems open out on the still unfinished business of empire from Ireland to Afghanistan and from the Mediterranean to the Pacific. The chorus of their many voices sings of lament, persistence and resistance.

Photos by the author.