Poetry that seeks kinship and hopeful futures amid traumas of colonialism, displacement, and climate disaster. The poems of Las Palmas conjure, walk beside, and tarry with the entangled grief of the long histories and violences in which we are all still embedded. Jones offers homage to the anguished beauties and truths that poet Jay Wright once said were “the disturbances” that “our ancestors create in us.” Grounded in musicality and haptics, Las Palmas seeks to salvage and mend while meditating on materiality, loss, cartography, kinship, displacement, coloniality, the “modern” world, and climate disasters. Throughout this collection, Keith Jones finds truth and community amid despair and the cruelest of circumstances, working through traumatic intimacies and mapping new imaginaries. Las Palmas is the winner of the 2023 Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest, selected by Brody Parrish Craig.
