Mohawk/Samoa: Transmigrations by James Thomas Stevens and Caroline Sinavaiana

Selected by Juliana Spahr for Subpress, MOHAWK/SAMOA: TRANSMIGRATIONS draws on the songs and stories of two geographically distant cultures to create a unique poetic collaboration. By writing beautifully spare new poems that stem out of each other’s translations from Mohawk and Samoan, James Thomas Stevens and Caroline Sinavaiana have ” created] an exciting mesh where Mohawk and Samoan inform each other to erase boundaries between individual and collective, past and present, inner and outer worlds.” —Arthur Sze

“Mohawk / Samoa Transmigrations is a slender project for a perfect-bound book, containing really just eight short poems apiece by James Thomas Stevens & Caroline Sinavaiana, but it also is quite a bit more than that. What that is lies all in the setting. Stevens is an Akwesasne Mohawk poet, teaching now at SUNY Fredonia. Sinavaiana is a Samoan-born poet, teaching now at the University of Hawai’i, spending half of each year on O’ahu, but the remainder of it in Dharamsala, India, where I believe she is involved in the large Tibetan Buddhist community in exile there. —Ron Silliman.

See more of Silliman’s review here