(Omnidawn, 2020)* New & Noteworthy: In Habitat Threshold, his first book since the from unincorporated territory tetralogy, Craig Santos Perez follows his daughter’s growth amidst environmental catastrophe. What does it look like for a parent-poet to retool his love for the land and his family within a world of animal extinction, toxic waste, and capitalism’s relentless repression of Native-Indigenous knowledge? Here’s the first line from his poem “We Aren’t the Only Species”: “who age who change who language who pain who play who pray who—.” Its repetition goes on similarly for another fourteen lines, inducing a kind of exercise in shared breathing. Perez also utilizes graphs, erasures, academic research, and fellow poets' adapted poems all to make the global more personal. Sometimes intensely and urgently dark, other times uplifting and humorous, this is a collection committed to building community around healing our planet.
