M. J. Gette • The Walls They Left Us • Print + E-book

Details:

• Winner of the 2015 Anzaldúa Poetry Prize.
• Saddle-stitched, 44 pages, 7″ x 7″, FSC-certified paper.
• Purchase allows three interactive PDF or EPUB downloads.
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Praise:

The most serious, the most sustainable poetry asks the question, ‘Who and what are we now?’ M. J. Gette’s The Walls They Left Us is an exquisitely written, understandably fragmented and multilingual, delicate and urgent attempt at a natural history of the human soul. Part travelogue to Mayan and Aztec ruins, including the story of the destruction of the oldest living tree, this work reminds us that we are always inhabitants of a new old world, ‘a language of methane / hydrocarbon, and nitrogen, spoken by the moon and the sun and the sand.’”
      –Melissa Kwasny

“These pages are filled with a mysterious tension that evolves from the revelations of a startling, new voice….”
      –Ray Gonzalez

“M.J. Gette’s The Walls They Left Us has such a unique and thrilling engine, the insistent overlap of history and origin. This book doesn’t just reinscribe, it builds alternative histories and mythologies as palaces and collisions. This book radiates with ‘luz from a thousand sources,’ an exciting debut by an exciting and original poet.”
      –Carmen Giménez Smith

 

Author:

M. J. Gette is an MFA candidate in Poetry at the University of Minnesota. Her work is rooted in ecological and anthropological research and has appeared or is forthcoming in Anthro/Poetics, BOAAT, Carolina Quarterly, Tupelo Quarterly, Fugue, otoliths, Indefinite Space, Eratio, and elsewhere. She was awarded a writer's residency with Arquetopia, Oaxaca, in 2015 to explore syncretism and space in architecture, culture, and poetics. She was also awarded the Marcella DeBourg Fellowship for giving voice to women's lives, in relation to her ongoing work with NGOs and nonprofits dedicated to migrant issues, ecological research, and Guatemalan and Latino women's rights. Most recently, she was awarded a FLAS fellowship to continue her studies of the Mayan Kaqchiquel language.

 

Reviews:

“What is evident in Gette’s ideas of place are sprouting seeds of ecopoetry and the ideas that stasis does not have to mean standing water, that maintenance of a land and its peoples is work. In a longer poem titled “Famine Fields,” Gette addresses “How we think we own the world we inhabit,” (23) a powerful line that is almost a response to the refrain “How does it go?” as though the speaker were asking the words to a song.”
      –Kimberly Ann Southwick, Ploughshares

 

Artwork:

Cover by D. Allen.

 

Purchase:

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