des_________: papeles, palabras, & poems from the desert. Poetry by Oscar Mancinas. Paperback 114 pages. December 13th, 2022. ISBN 9781948800556.

In his 1945 essay “Poetry and Knowledge,” Aimé Césaire wrote: within poetry “Everything has the right to life. Everything is called. Everything is waiting; I mean everything.” It’s fitting, then, that Césaire appears alongside conversations, colonial chronicles, Yelp reviews, legislative language, headlines, song lyrics, political proclamations, treaties, academic research, memories, op-eds, creation stories, tweets, and other poetic everythings in des_________: papeles, palabras, & poems from the desert . At the heart of this collection are the people, deserts, and neighborhoods of central Arizona. Des collects and relays stories of Indigenous and migrant belonging, displacement, resistance, and hope; it’s a multilingual, Rarámuri, Chicanx attempt to “relate/belong/remain…within O’odham jewed.” In other words, Des draws upon the poetry of desert homelands and merges it to an unsettled belonging.