JACKET2 REVIEWS CHRISTINA OLIVARES' BOOK!

Davy Knittle reviews Christina Olivares' Marsh Hawk Prize-winning collection, No Map of the Earth Includes Stars for Jacket2. You can go HERE for the review but here's an excerpt:

As Olivares’s poems attempt to map the loss of the speaker’s father, they work to build a set of family narratives. In 2010, Olivares received a grant from the Jerome Foundation to conduct research in Cuba on the practice of Santería and to learn more about the context of her family history that brought members of her family to the US in the mid-1960s. The series of poems that extends from Olivares’s research appears within “Petition” and addresses Babalu Aye, an orisha, or spirit, often invoked in Santería to remedy illness and strongly associated with exile and death. 

“Babalu Aye” is often translated as “Lord of the Earth.”[2] The earth that the book’s title maps is the domain of Babalu Aye, and its poems feel like a space of prayer that records what has been and honors people who are dead to make sense of how they died. Images of bodies take the shape of the celestial and the elemental — sky and earth, but also stars and sea — as Olivares negotiates the competing scales of an elegy that’s also a family history and wonders at larger cultural narratives, all while trying to locate the speaker within its scalar shifts.Earth Includes Stars for Jacket2.