The Seed Bank

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. "This is a book that sows words like seeds in the breach of sense and language, body and place, monument and ruin, self and nation. 'There is material here that will start the rebuilding,' Gabe Gómez assures us, and that material is found in the 'the foreign / body,' the 'broken English of immigrants,' a 'patois,' and in 'our mother tongue,' where 'a kind of melody / stifled by letters' tries to 'sound out the new world.' These seeds 'find patterns / in the mayhem // from patterns in their flight.' THE SEED BANK offers hope, then, in the very materials discarded, splintered, unvalued, forgotten in the wake of natural disaster or assimilation or Monsanto: what each of us holds in our hands, our ancient seeds, our memories and nouns, our desires and verbs, our individual and hybrid voices, which can take root anywhere and disrupt the order with a field of wildflowers. We need this book to remind us, again and again, of our strength, our flexible syntax, our 'hard breath blooming' against a grammar of destruction."--Rosa Alcalá