Suelo Tide Cement by Christina Vega-Westhoff (Nightboat Books, paperback)
Publication Date: April 1, 2018
Publisher Marketing: Poetry. Women's Studies. Winner of the 2017 Nightboat Prize for Poetry. Begun at a residency in Panama where community members, artists, activists, and scientists came together to learn from and create with soil, and written in the midst of a development boom, SUELO TIDE CEMENT searches for a meeting point between personal and geologic experiences. With a nearly chemical pattern to the syntax, the language of the poem moves like bodies in a dance or water through rain, air, groundwater, and lake. 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.
