Splinters Are Children of Wood

Leia Penina Wilson is an afakasi Samoan poet hailing from the Midwest. Her work has appeared in Dream Pop Press, Split Lip, Birdfeast, Bombay Gin, Powder Keg, and OmniVerse. She is the author of i built a boat with all the towels in your closet (and will let you drown), winner of the 2012 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize.

• am i the world or the gurli appear seeking revenge for the destruction of those childrenyou must always feed from the bodies

"In this stark and arresting book-length sequence, Wilson asks questions of violence, victimization, and complicity . . . with its blend of spare but powerful lines, many readers will find this an inspired effort to rally disempowered voices." —Publishers Weekly"Unbecoming is the sister wife of becoming. In Leia Penina Wilson's Splinters are Children of Wood, the things of the world give themselves over to partiality to find a place to bear and be. As the splinter is the offspring byproduct of the wood, so Wilson's poems put forward an ongoing, generative womanhood that is as joyous as it is terrified and angry. I'm gratified by the ultimate welcome I hear in this lovely book, and by Leia Wilson's unwillingness to accept anything but her whole experience." —Claudia Keelan, author of We Step into the Sea: New and Selected Poems"Like the sea, this book is feral, choral, and female. The speaker bares fang and claw to dig to the source of all violences but finds there is no bottom to the violences she must unearth; drawing on her own capacity for newness as well as the ingenuity of her grandmothers, she denatures and remakes these violences, configuring shield and spear, shrapnel-epic and battle-engine. If this poetry is cannibalistic and blood-drenched, it is the trans-hemispheric, trans-historical patriarchy that it consumes with cosmic joy, growing larger and stronger as it does so. 'Vengeance! come!' she sings in self-delight. 'A poem / pigeon eaten out by rat saved you.'" —Joyelle McSweeney, author of The Necropastoral"Leia Penina Wilson has carved an epic, avant-garde, feminist spell. She calls forth the wildness of language in order to dispel the violence against––and to evoke the power of––'gurls' and women. Within the mythos of this book, we encounter 'guardian beasts,' the Samoan female warrior Nafanua, scarred/sacred bodies, a 'sharpsharp' tongue, golden cunt, and ancestral skulls. Read these poems aloud to hear its haunting 'bloodsong' emblossom the wounds of this splintered world." —Craig Santos Perez