Suelo Tide Cement

Author: Christina Vega-Westhoff

Publisher: Nightboat (2018)

Suelo Tide Cement began at a residency in Panama that brought together artists, scientists, activists, and community members to learn from and create with soil. Written serially in the midst of a development boom, the poem performs a compostual incantation, moving like water or bodies in a dance as it investigates questions of language, health, economy, and empire. Fragments make lyrics make a narrative make an epic. In its search for a meeting point between personal and geologic experiences, one is never sure whether the poem takes place in the flash of a second or whether whole eons of planetary time are tectonically drifting.