Alan Pelaez Lopez

To Love and Mourn in the Age of Displacement Alan Pelaez Lopez

Poetry. African & African American Studies. Latinx Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. California Interest. Classroom guide and introduction written by author inside. An elegy and a celebration, TO LOVE AND MOURN IN THE AGE OF DISPLACEMENT by Alan Pelaez Lopez is an attempt to make a / world anew via the conjuring properties of poetry. Alan Pelaez Lopez reflects on what it means to embody a multidimensional existence as Black and Indigenous in an empire committed to maintain the global circuit of anti-Blackness paired with settler violence. By mediating death, fragmented romantic encounters, and the news, the collection insists/argues/declares that those who have survived (/are surviving) structural violence create abundance where [one] thought there was none. In such declaration, the poet refuses a single-story of violence in order to make space for an AfroIndigenous future rooted in kinship and mourning practices.