Roberto Harrison

Yaviza Roberto Harrison

Poetry. Latinx Studies. YAVIZA, the title of Roberto Harrison's new book, is also the name of a small Panamanian jungle town with a declining population and a colonized history. YAVIZA marks the end of the Panamerican Highway and hence, perhaps, of U. S. imperialist influence. YAVIZA (the book) takes up a different journey-a vision quest of sorts-an act of liberatory re-enchantment. The poetry emerges out of personal, as well as political, struggle, and the book can be read as an ars poetica. But it is also a demonstration of the transformative power of language, liberated from the prosaic and wild with incantatory imagination, beckoning us into a world of plural consciousness.