Last Days

by Tamiko Beyer

Overview

Last Days is a practice of radical imagination for our current political and environmental crises. It excavates the conditions that have brought us here—white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, corporate power, capitalism—and calls ancestors, birds, organizers, and lovers to conjure a new world. It explores how to transform our future to be more beautiful, more just, and more compassionate than we can imagine.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948579407
Publisher:	Alice James Books
Publication date:	04/13/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Tamiko Beyer is the author of Last Days (Alice James Books, 2021), We Come Elemental (Alice James Books, 2013), and two chapbooks of poems. Her work has been published in Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, Idaho Review, Literary Hub, the Rumpus, Hyphen, Dusie, and elsewhere. She publishes Starlight&Strategy, a monthly newsletter for living life wide awake and shaping change. She has received awards, fellowships, and residencies from PEN America, Kundiman, Hedgebrook, VONA, and the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund, among others. A social justice communications writer and strategist, she spends her days writing truth to power.

Table of Contents

What It Means to Be Human 1

Tankas for What Comes Together 3

Estuary 4

Solstice 7

We Are Bodies in Bodies We Are Stars 8

Unraval All Systems Go 10

Wintering 12

Call It 13

COVOD-19 Triptych 14

Tankas for What Comes Together 17

Equinox 18

Anchor in the Mud 19

Correct Pronunciation 21

Generations 23

What the Grandmothers Say 26

Last Days 27

Tankas for What Comes Together 43

Experiment in Revolution, 2016 44

Solstice 46

Blue Passport 47

Root and Rise 50

Experiment in Revolution, 2020 53

21st Century Eable 55

Sweet Branch Stitched to Bitter Tree 58

Subterranean Haibuns 59

Open 62

I Vow to Be the Small Flame 63

Tankas for What Comes Together 65

[ ] 66

The Flood 71

Equinox 72

Genesis: Featherling 73

Murmuration 74

Birds of a Feather 76

Notes and Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

"At this moment in history, a singular question often arises: what happens to the self and to the group when a keen part of ourself is the Other? Tamiko Beyer allows the question to be complex because, for her, even being human has its Otherness. In the phrase 'slip // of boundaries' ('Estuaries'), we are introduced early in the collection to a staff that may assist in climbing into and along with these gorgeous poems, some of which 'slip' form from Western open verse to authentically realized haiku and haibun. The slip is also identity from mixed race to queer to class to human; the slip is language as well as poetics —”especially for those in Japanese forms; and it is that abiding psychological Freudian slip. (And perhaps, a female garment, given Beyerâ's playfulness!) And, then there is location, whether subterranean or alternate. Enter into this collection of Last Days and enjoy powerful discoveries in her crossings and lines." —”Kimiko Hahn, author of Foreign Bodies

From the Publisher