A Bell Made of Stones

"Lehua M. Taitano was born on Guåhan (Guam), the largest of the Marianas Islands, to a Chamorro mother and a Euro-American father. When Taitano was four years old, her family migrated to the Appalachia mountains of North Carolina. Since that time, she has lived in many different places on the continental United States. The poetry in Taitano's first collection, entitled A BELL MADE OF STONES, attempts to reconstruct the foundations of home through story, fragments, echo, and type. Chamorro people, indigenous to the Marianas archipelago in the region of Pacific known as Micronesia, once built their houses atop rows of 'latte,' a two-tiered stone structure composed of a pillar and a capstone. The shape of the latte resembles a bell. These poems experiment with typographic representation and juxtaposition; in addition to the visual impact of these poems, Taitano bravely asks what it means to live a hyphenated, diasporic existence at the 'intersections of half-ness.' With the typewriter as her canoe, Taitano chants homeward 'for the flightless, to stretch roots, for the husk of things set adrift.' Lehua Taitano's unforgettable poetry joins a new wave of Chamorro and Pacific literature. In A BELL MADE OF STONES, she bravely navigates the currents of mixed-race indigenous identity, transoceanic migration, and queer sexuality through a series of experimental (and lyrical) typographic poems. With the typewriter as her canoe, Taitano chants homeward 'for the flightless, to stretch roots, for the husk of things set adrift.'"--Craig Santos Perez.