After reading Lehua Taitano’s poetry, I found myself turning to those I love and saying, Have you ever read anything like this? It is not just that her work is innovative and fresh, but the care with with she holds and weaves our attention from military base to bird song, human love to political force. Textured, nuanced, and alive, Taitano’s poems immerse us in an ecosystem of relation. Love of homeland – of Guåhan – is a steady ground in these poems from which Taitano stands and invites us into marvel and heartbreak. Taitano extends the work of her poetry in her roles as educator, organizer and collaborator connecting Indigenous, Pacific Islander, and diasporic communities. In her poetry and work in community, Taitano creates spaces for relationships, reckoning, and collective liberation. To quote Taitano, the work is at its core, a practice of relationship: tending to land, to language, to culture, and to each other as we shape decolonial futures together.
– Laurel Nakanishi, Winner of the 2023-2024 Tony Quagliano Award
SELECTION OF POETRY
Current, I
Excerpt from the poem originally published in Care Package by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, by Lehua Taitano:
Read the full version here, or watch the video in Care Package bringing together her reading and images.
“Calls to Demand the Return (for a Fair Price, in Good Faith), or, With a Typhoon Wind: We, Prisoners of Conscience, Protest Bars and bullets, Swallowed Fledglings, the Gone Hurricane of Pelicans (from alcatraces), and Further Desecrations”
after Ai Wei Wei, Michael Lujan Bevacqua, and various documents of protest by Indigenous dissidents.
Read the full poem (PDF) here.
Lehua M. Taitano is a queer CHamoru writer and interdisciplinary artist from Yigu, Guåhan (Guam) and co-founder of the art collective Art 25: Art in the Twenty-fifth Century. Her poetry, essays, and Pushcart Prize-nominated fiction have been published internationally, and includes two books of poetry—Inside Me an Island and A Bell Made of Stones—and many chapbooks of poetry, short fiction, and visual art, including Sonoma, Capacity, and appalachiapacific, which won the Merriam-Frontier Award for short fiction.
Taitano has received fellowship support from Submittable and The University of Arizona’s Poetry Center. She has served as poetry faculty for the Kundiman Writers’ Retreat and as a Curatorial Council member for Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ Triennial exhibition of contemporary art. She is the current Program and Community Manager at Kearny Street Workshop, where she coordinates APAture, an annual festival of Pacific Islander and Asian American art. Taitano’s work investigates modern indigeneity, decolonization, and cultural identity in the context of diaspora.