Bridge of the World

Author: Roberto Harrison

Publisher: Litmus Press (2017)

Bridge of the World maps multiple transits between mental, spiritual, and geographic topographies, pivoting on the experience of dislocation from Panama and Latinidad. This is a journey over bridges between inner and outer worlds, between the cosmic and the material, the past and the present, and the immediate and memory. Traversing is bound up in the alienations of migration, economic disparity, the violations of capitalism, and the cosmic betrayals in the struggle to hold onto love in the place of rage. Harrison's is a poetics that explores psychological fragmentation as the natural condition of a life lived suspended in multiple in-betweens. Place is colossal, mundane objects swell with symbolism, time and memory warp, and plague the mind and poetry with visions. These poems are glutted with the revelation and pain that braid themselves through the poet's living—a brave and undulating work that invites us into a love defiant and resolutely alive.