Its EARTH DAY and my new eco-poetry book is coming your way!
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Hello Good People,
Please receive my good wishes on this Earth Day!
Spending time in the natural world and writing poetry have been important ways to find balance during such challenging times. I’ve made an ecology book with poems, translations from friends all over the world, and photographs to share with you!
My editor’s first comment about this book is that “it is full of language!” Ha! True! It is an eco-poetry book about habitat, multi-species, and language restoration. Hopefully it will seed a sense of connectedness and care for each other and our planet
Here is an interview I did with Avery Castillo about the book.
Earth Day is the first day to pre-order your own copy of Random Experiments in Bioluminescence. The book includes an introduction by the lovely Gayle Brandeis. Preordering books is very helpful for poets and small presses alike. I would greatly appreciate your support by ordering an advance copy on Earth Day. Feel free to share this email with friends to get the word out!
Here is a link to pre-order your copy from Flowersong Press
Connecting in community is one of my favorite things to do. Invite me to your class, book club, or community group to read poems and even guide a participatory workshop to get you all writing too.
If you would like to review the book send me a note and we will make that happen! Thank you! For readings & workshops contact Creo Changemakers.
After you order your own copy, please consider requesting your local library or bookstore purchase a copy too. Angelenos, here is the link to request the LA Public Library purchase a copy for folks to share. If you are somewhere else in the world, search “suggest purchase + the name of your public library” and you should be able to find a link to request a purchase. You will need this info to place the Library order: Title: Random Experiments in Bioluminescence; Author: Amy Shimshon-Santo; Publisher: Flowersong Books; Publication Date: August 2024; ISBN: 978-1-963245-35-6]
Thanks for reading this note! Feel free to message me, say hello, and let me know about the wonderful things you are doing to help people and the planet.
Thanks for pre-ordering your copy of Random Experiments in Bioluminescence on EARTH DAY!
Gratefully,
Amy
From the Publisher: A remarkable collection of poems for cherishing language and habitat on Earth — From poet and urbanist Dr. Amy Shimshon-Santo.
“Listen with your natural body,” writes Shimshon-Santo. “In the beginning, there was song.” Random Experiments in Bioluminescence tracks a woman’s search for connection, language, and belonging. She pays homage to urban trees, walks along the Pacific Ocean holding the feather of a gull, and hears rain play marimba on forest leaves and branches. She experiments with form, scribbling faux-mathematical formulas to echolocate herself within the cosmos. Choral, cryptographic, and exhilarating, Shimshon-Santo provides glimpses into a poetics of livability.
The collection opens with a “genealogy of the moment,” where a cast of human characters is replaced by a sketch of interconnections: paw prints, gestures, sunlight. Her accomplices are letters and millipedes, sparrows and lemon trees, shadow and light—in “x or x prime clock time.” All life has agency. Trees and vines tangle their hair together to escape over brick walls. A piano decomposes into forest mulch. Seaweed fronds curl around pilings. Gravity “plants humans in the ground like oaks” while a black bird murmuration elevates skyward. The poet finally locates herself within the cosmos as a “rapture gawker of infinity consciousness.”
Her verse has kinesthetic authority on the page, flowing from right to left, left to right, or woven top down into a conversation between four languages. Mother tongues share pages, side-by-side-by-side, in a line dance of translations by the author, her family, and friends. A “Villanelle for Yemanja” (Ifa deity and mother of the fishes) coexists with a piyyut inspired by the talmudic Akdamut. She morphs poems into flow charts, pictograms, haikus, and chants, all scattered between photographs. The outcome of her “random experiments” is a homecoming to the body and the planet; respect for womanhood, and awe for the multiplicity of life, languages, and habitats on planet Earth.
Keywords: poetry; nature poems; birds; insects; botany; California; trees; Pacific Ocean; natural world; nature; ecology; restoration; translation, language; mother tongue; piyyut ; mother
Cover Art: Pao Chutijirawong
Author Photo: Bobby Gordon
Publisher: Flowersong Press
Pre-sales: Available on April 22, Earth Day
Pub Date: August 2024
ISBN: 978-1-963245-35-6