Poetry chapbook, Dropleaf Press, 2017

“This chapbook continues Taitano’s diasporic mapping of landscapes and bodyscapes. Here…a languid love letter to Sonoma, California, its lake, its lack, and its simultaneous familiarity and foreignness. The speaker here is ‘adrift’ in diaspora, but also attuned to the pleasures of displacement. From a diasporic Chamorro perspective, there’s of course 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 Chamorro and Pacific poetics, Taitano’s work evinces a strong eco-poetic dimension, especially with regard to the intersections between environmental and colonial violence… A great poet once wrote, ‘Pardon me 4 breathing, can we borrow some of your air?’ Taitano’s Sonoma unpacks the question with the exquisite flow of its breath.” —Urayoan Noel

“Sonoma as a book of dignity and definition. As the result of craft. As a result of the poet as present, to siphon, funnel, perceive, relay. Taitano as the investigator, but there needs to be another word: a form of investigation that exhibits respect, is careful, is intensely aware and is resolved to an acceptance of the emerging beauty.”—Greg Bem