Yaviza

Author: Roberto Harrison

Publisher: Atelos (2017)

YAVIZA, the title of Roberto Harrison's new book, is also the name of a small Panamanian jungle town with a declining population and a colonized history. YAVIZA marks the end of the Panamerican Highway and hence, perhaps, of U.S. imperialist influence. YAVIZA (the book) takes up a different journey—a vision quest of sorts—an act of liberatory re-enchantment. The poetry emerges out of personal, as well as political, struggle, and the book can be read as an ars poetica. But it is also a demonstration of the transformative power of language, liberated from the prosaic and wild with incantatory imagination, beckoning us into a world of "plural consciousness."