How to Love a Sinking Island

At once incisive and tender, heralded as “a landmark of craft and conscience” (Tracy K. Smith), this debut from award-winning poet Lana Reeves rigorously examines the effects of island colonialism at the geographical, spiritual, and cellular level

A collection lush with the peoples and landscapes of Hawai‘i, How to Love a Sinking Island explores what it means to be of a settled place, and the moral and physical obligations that ongoing colonialism demands. Fearless in her self-examination, and deeply loving of the islands she calls home, Lana Reeves negotiates her identity through questions of autonomy, familial inheritance, reparations, and stewardship, calling her community—and island communities across the globe—into dialogue around the responsibilities, and joys, of interrogating our relationship to place, of communing with our histories, and of imagining our imperiled future. Musically dazzling and polyvocal in form, How to Love a Sinking Island announces the arrival of a luminous new poetic voice that celebrates the hybridity of the body, its multitudes of expression, and its liberatory sound.