Alchemies of Distance

Difficult Terrain ""Growing up `colored' in the American south of the 1950s, amid the hooded dangers of working class, immigrant life, I understood poetry as oxygen. And I wanted to breathe,"" writes Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard, born in Samoa, and now a professor of literature at the University of Hawai'i Manoa. Alchemies of Distance contains 20 poems that alternate between lyric and narrative, verse and prose. At a local fair, a shopper has a heart attack amid ""bric-a-brac & over-priced t-shirt dresses dried grasses in garish colors, gaily be-ribboned clumps of pathos, fake tapa & hawaiian deities air-brushed on tanks & tees."" Another poem tracks a ""thing with feathers,"" finding it in southern Florida, Berkeley, Samoa, Hawaii, and New Zealand, ending up at ""Turtle Island the wakened song of your long dreaming and wandering into sunrise. Haere Mai."" Haere Mai is Maori for welcome. (June)