Inside Me and Island is a collection of the sediment of displacement, re-placement, and imagined arrival. With one eye focused (inwardly) on an island homeland and the other roving the natural world for what resembles home, Taitano investigates the push and pull of queer migratory belonging. For the indigenous islander living in diaspora, constructing identity in neocolonial America requires conjuring wholeness from fragments. Transoceanic and transcontinental, subterranean and aerial, these poems sift the waters, from shore to reservoir.
Poems, Wordtech Editions, 2018
"Translating the ever-flowing movement of the sea, Taitano expresses herself through the versatility of her poetry. In 17 poems Ma'te (Low Tide) explores memories of the sea and her siblings (Shore Song, Create a sibling...), visitations of ancestral spirits (A Night Crowded With Night), erasure and reconnection (Islanders waiting for Snow), patriotism and militarism (Spectator), encounters with racism (Banana Queen) and the feeling of displacement (Trespass). Likewise, Hafnot (High Tide) explores nature and landscape of the mainland United States (Enchanted Rock, Texas) as well as the indigenous stories that are connected to the land (One Kind of Hunger). Taitano's poems also explore emotional memories of grief (An Oiled Groove) and love (Estuary). With its queer female diasporic Chamoru voice, Lehua Taitano's latest poetry collection enriches the multiplicity of unique styles and voices of Chamorro poetry."—Julie Szews
“From a diasporic Chamoru perspective, there’s an irreconcilable difference between island and mainland, and between the expanses of California and the accidents of the psychic archipelago, but Taitano’s poetics works by queering that distance, by finding the homology in difference, by embracing the synaesthetic intimacies of landscape...As with other Chamoru and Pacific poetics, Taitano’s work evinces a strong eco-poetic dimension, especially with regard to the intersections between environmental and colonial violence...” — Urayoàn Noel
With this work, Lehua M. Taitano’s voice strikes the prayer bowl. Within is an invocation to gather in the spaces beyond false boundary lines ‘because the news tells us who we are not’ and ‘because our voices are choked in the fumes of B-1 bombers.’ This profound collection is a fierce love letter without beginning or end, a spiraling medicine that moves as water does. A necessary read.”—Arlene Biala