the more i learn, the more i learn
i don't know what the fuck
i'm talking about. someone
who doesn't care a fig for poetry
might think i knew a lot
yet in most bookshops i'm lost,
shelves heavy with the bodies
of forgotten writers. it's relative.
a president can say audacity or
a president can say sad & both eat
the slow-cured meat of empire.
when i say i carry my people
inside me i don't mean a country.
the star that hangs from my neck
is simply a way of saying israel
is not a physical place but can be
written down & carried anywhere.
it says my people are most beautiful
when moving, when movement,
when our only state is the liquid
state of water, is adapting to our container.
homeland sometimes just means
what books you've read, what stories
you spread with your sneakers.
my people, any place you live
long enough to build bombs
is a place you've lived too long—
it's relative. my friends, the only
thing i know for sure is the missiles
on television are only beautiful
if you've never known suffering.
my friends, the only country i will
ever pledge my allegiance to
is your music, is under investigation
for treason.
from the book PIG /  Scribner Books
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Cover of "Emerald Wounds"
"No Forbidden Places: On Joyce Mansour's Emerald Wounds"

"Emerald Wounds, translated by Emilie Moorhouse and edited by Garrett Caples, is the latest project that resurrects Mansour’s poems, spanning her entire career...Her work has been translated into English before, but...most are out of print and difficult to find. This means that, for many English readers, Moorhouse’s translations will be the first time they come into contact with Mansour’s erotic and ravenous work."

via LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
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Cover of Removal Acts
What Sparks Poetry:
Erin Marie Lynch on Reading Prose

"My family's archive was haunting me. Or the archive beneath the archive, the archive against the archive. The archive that could be for us. I was trying to trace the movements of my ancestors backwards, from Oregon to Standing Rock to the Dakota homelands in Minnesota. I needed to find out whether my great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth, had been involved in the forced march following the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 and the following atrocities. And I needed poetry to understand the varied and various rippings and sutures of our people and our land."
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