A conjuration of ancient consciousness aimed at rehumanizing our contemporary cyborg condition. "Referring to the American continent, 'Abya Yala' ('land of life') is a pre-Columbian term of the Guna people of Panamá and Colombia. Harrison wrestles with language, racism, and humanity in political and spiritual poems." — Publishers Weekly , Most Anticipated Poetry Books, Spring 2024 “Abya Yala”—“land of life” or “land of vital blood”—is a Pre-Columbian term of the Guna people of Panamá and Colombia to refer to the American continent and more recently has signified the idea of a decolonized “New World” among various Indigenous movements. In Isthmus to Abya Yala , Panamanian American poet Roberto Harrison summons a mythic consciousness in response to this political and spiritual struggle. In his poems, with mystic fervor, Harrison finds phonetic unities concealing conceptual oppositions he must transcend. Invoking “mobilian” as an ur-language against racism and toward an all-inclusive humanity—in opposition to the “mobile” of phone-mediated existence—the poems of Isthmus to Abya Yala burn with a visionary ardor that overpowers rationality through an intensive accumulation of imagery. They even sometimes manifest as visual poems in the form of drawings he calls “Tecs,” opposing the dominance of technology to the advocacy of pan-Indian nationhood by 19th century Shawnee leader Tecumseh. “Tecumseh Republic” is the poet’s name for a new post-racial, post-national, post-binary, post-colonial, holistic and earth-oriented society with no national borders, with Panamá, the isthmus, as its only entry and exit. Praise for Isthmus to Abya Yala : "This astounding book works as both summation and revision of Roberto Harrison’s long-running hemispheric poetics, among the most beautiful and powerful of our time. Rooted in surrealism, the Latin American neo-baroque, and the geopoetics of the author’s native Panama, Isthmus to Abya Yala theorizes its own mode of ‘Mobilian’ world-building, where the juxtaposition of words and visual art achieves a counter-ecology of ‘suprarational' vision in light and shadows amid 'the business cycle of terror.’" —Urayoán Noel, author of Transversal "What Roberto Harrison accomplishes within these pages of  Abya Yala  is not some super-imposed current but fiery liquefaction that ignites transparency as alchemic kinetic."— Will Alexander, author of  Divine Blue Light (for John Coltrane) “Harrison’s smoke of song somehow drifts above its own finite exchange of verbs, just as Abya Yala’s darkness undoes the isolation of original consciousness. . . . Harrison writes beyond the dis-appearance of poetics, where signs become therapeutic codes for experimental animals. The kindling of ash becomes something new and far from tears: we are the isthmus or what is left of it.” —Carlos Lara, author of Like Bismuth When I Enter Roberto Harrison 's poetry books include Tropical Lung: exi(s)t(s) (Omnidawn, 2021), Tropical Lung: Mitologia Panameña (Nion Editions, 2020), Yaviza (Atelos, 2017), Bridge of the World (Litmus Press, 2017), culebra (Green Lantern Press, 2016), bicycle (Noemi Press, 2015), Counter Daemons (Litmus Press, 2006), Os (subpress, 2006), as well as many chapbooks. With Andrew Levy, Harrison edited the poetry journal Crayon from 1997 to 2008. He was also the editor of Bronze Skull Press which published over 20 chapbooks, including the work of many Midwestern poets. Most recently, Harrison served as a co-editor for the Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance anthology. He was the Milwaukee Poet Laureate from 2017–2019 and is also a visual artist. He lives in Milwaukee with his wife, the poet Brenda Cárdenas. DELETE MOUNT RUSHMORE the color of blood and the color of night fail to be shadows as the rope pulls its own family detriment on the underside of the face. as the remainder pushes to a nuclear shirt and some background exception places the red mark under the jungle process to redo the body and feel out the fast calculation of an ulterior mind. where the most correct description does its fashion under the coat and deceives what the momentary escape from murder, the small conversation show that the country makes as it falls. when the season and its hostile number relieve what a grown bank rot of the execution that does not allow, the face to face wheel that takes away, the underlying force in the ocean swelling to betray the declaration and its precepts circling accumulation and sorrow. without one to release and to become the memory of its relation outside of the haunt of the business cycle of terror, or the mud climbing return to the home of the Sea, as its language is placed outside on the many growths of the front to equate the weapons and the salt. but then the eatery comes on to resent and to happen as a connection to wind and terror again with mud on my hands. where is the blood? what the four returns to the approaching eastern side of th