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To Love an Island
Ana Portnoy Brimmer’s debut, To Love an Island, offers the stark recognition that disaster is political and colonialism the most violent of storms. Beginning with the aftermath of Hurricane María and spanning the summer insurrection of 2019 and subsequent earthquakes in Puerto Rico, To Love An Island is an exploration of collective trauma, an outpour of amassed grief, a desire for unleashed mourning, a fuck-you to resilience, a brandishing of resistance. Of brazen decolonial conviction—it summons tempests, departures, strawberries, cacerolas, mangroves, guillotines, all the complexities of loving a place under imperial duress.
Included in P & W's 17th Annual Debut Feature!
"If you were unsure about the poet's role in the world, look no further than Ana Portnoy Brimmer's To Love an Island. This book reads like a lyrical diatribe of resistance, passion, oceans, metaphor, and the power of hurricanes; it is stunningly insightful on how to practice solidarity, create revolution, embrace love, and exercise our humanity. Portnoy Brimmer is the archipelago's quintessential warrior poet: decolonized, fearless, speaking truth to oppression, and making room for the heart to come out of its shadow and sing."
—Willie Perdomo, State Poet of New York and author of The Crazy Bunch
Ana Portnoy Brimmer’s poetry reckons with and does the careful work of what Anjelamaría Dávila called holding our “solitudes in shared company.” To Love an Island moves through the collective trauma that follows devastation, the intimacy of shared grief in the face of settler colonialism and displacement, and finally ends in a burst of protest. Portnoy’s voice is rich, meticulous, and backed by care networks. It translates the immediacy of loss into the urgent need for change, and in doing so opens a window to a different future for Puerto Rico.
—Raquel Salas Rivera, author of lo terciario/ the tertiary and antes que isla es volcán/ before island is volcano
Included in P & W's 17th Annual Debut Feature!
"If you were unsure about the poet's role in the world, look no further than Ana Portnoy Brimmer's To Love an Island. This book reads like a lyrical diatribe of resistance, passion, oceans, metaphor, and the power of hurricanes; it is stunningly insightful on how to practice solidarity, create revolution, embrace love, and exercise our humanity. Portnoy Brimmer is the archipelago's quintessential warrior poet: decolonized, fearless, speaking truth to oppression, and making room for the heart to come out of its shadow and sing."
—Willie Perdomo, State Poet of New York and author of The Crazy Bunch
Ana Portnoy Brimmer’s poetry reckons with and does the careful work of what Anjelamaría Dávila called holding our “solitudes in shared company.” To Love an Island moves through the collective trauma that follows devastation, the intimacy of shared grief in the face of settler colonialism and displacement, and finally ends in a burst of protest. Portnoy’s voice is rich, meticulous, and backed by care networks. It translates the immediacy of loss into the urgent need for change, and in doing so opens a window to a different future for Puerto Rico.
—Raquel Salas Rivera, author of lo terciario/ the tertiary and antes que isla es volcán/ before island is volcano
- GenresPoetry
126 pages, Paperback
First published December 20, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 2, 2022
This collection of poems is simply beautiful. It portraits so well the heaviness of living on an Island, the never ending suffocation and the permanent feeling of drowning once faced with the inescapable presence of the water that surrounds us. It’s about the bittersweet feeling of loving an island and the melancholy that gets stuck in the throat when forced to leave/abandon it. It’s also a poetic voice that denounces Puerto Rico’s everyday colonial injustices and neoliberal exploitation by local government and neo/crypto colonizers and that creates a picture of hurricane María’s aftermath.
“To love an island… is leaving
is never learning / how to swim
knowing / that it ends / with drowning”
“we live
without remedy
without patch and plaster
oftentimes without escape
under the turbine of outbound flights
shredding our ceilings to polyethylene rain”
“They say in their own land, no one is a prophet.
They say on an island, to make a profit, kill a prophet”.
“How we’ve been made to feel minute.
How our geography has been wielded
against us, corralled in by dimension”.
“To love an island… is leaving
is never learning / how to swim
knowing / that it ends / with drowning”
“we live
without remedy
without patch and plaster
oftentimes without escape
under the turbine of outbound flights
shredding our ceilings to polyethylene rain”
“They say in their own land, no one is a prophet.
They say on an island, to make a profit, kill a prophet”.
“How we’ve been made to feel minute.
How our geography has been wielded
against us, corralled in by dimension”.
January 10, 2022
In her debut book, Ana Portnoy Brimmer exposes many truths about the suffering of colonial subjects in Puerto Rico. I jealously wished the poetic voice would have kept more details obscure. However, 'To Love an Isalnd' encapsulates a specific moment in Puerto Rican History. It is beautiful and painful, dire but hopeful.
Bravo, Ana! I look forward to the Spanish translation!
(4.5)
Bravo, Ana! I look forward to the Spanish translation!
(4.5)
December 7, 2023
such a fantastic collection- would be my top recommendation for anyone who is interested in poetry but hasn't enjoyed it in the past
December 31, 2021
I had the honour of blurbing Ana's debut collection:
Here, then, is inflorescence. Not merely in the act of a poet’s debut collection blooming into being, but in the variegated creep, growth and flourish of a radically committed body of work. Wound into the vines and roots of Ana Portnoy Brimmer’s To Love an Island is this remarkable witness: a lyrical fidelity to the rhythms and languages of Puerto Rico that holds itself open, too, to the sea blast of violent natural predation, the calamity of the hurricane, the garrote of selective exotification at the bloodied hands of the United States of America. Press your ear to these poems. Hear their history, see what the poet conjures from the battlements of gasoline, matches, guttering light bulbs, machetes, murders, and the wings of hummingbirds. O Caribbean, your new poems are here, and they have so much to say. Escucha bien.
Please, live with Ana's work. Buy this debut. Breathe it in.
Here, then, is inflorescence. Not merely in the act of a poet’s debut collection blooming into being, but in the variegated creep, growth and flourish of a radically committed body of work. Wound into the vines and roots of Ana Portnoy Brimmer’s To Love an Island is this remarkable witness: a lyrical fidelity to the rhythms and languages of Puerto Rico that holds itself open, too, to the sea blast of violent natural predation, the calamity of the hurricane, the garrote of selective exotification at the bloodied hands of the United States of America. Press your ear to these poems. Hear their history, see what the poet conjures from the battlements of gasoline, matches, guttering light bulbs, machetes, murders, and the wings of hummingbirds. O Caribbean, your new poems are here, and they have so much to say. Escucha bien.
Please, live with Ana's work. Buy this debut. Breathe it in.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews