Landia by Celina Su
Belladonna*
2018
Softcover / 203 x 229 cm / 112 pp
ISBN 978-0-9988439-1-9
$16
LANDIA excavates literal and figurative borderlands—redrawn boundaries, architectural palimpsests, underground transport systems—to reckon with the historical and cultural forces that shape our cities and our intimate lives. The book serves as a meditation on imagined and real and hoped-for migrations—of course, Su's own history permeates, but these poems also draw upon more than a decade of fieldwork, collaborative projects, and long-term relationships with specific immigrant communities and social justice organizations in southeast Asia, Latin America, and throughout the United States. Echoing tensions in social research, LANDIA is also a reflexive project, questioning documentation as intervention. "A map is not the territory, / but it becomes so over time." Fueled by fragmentation, the poems act as plaintive pleas to elude and resist the violent institutions that govern us, to trace the contours of new imaginaries and border crossings.