Future Botanic

by Christina Olivares

In Future Botanic Christina Olivares continues her interrogation of inheritance, history, legacy, queer love, and what is owed. From the Bronx to Cuba, the poetic voice and the poetic soul's eye is relentlessly, and yet tenderly, vigilant in seeing the world. Olivares' poems are lyrical meditations- in some cases, spells- that embody, vivify and reckon with the geography of the Americas and the centuries-long postcolonial condition.

112 pages, Paperback

Published August 1, 2023

About the author

Christina Olivares is the author of No Map of the Earth Includes Stars (2015), winner of the 2014 Marsh Hawk Press Book Prize, and of the chaplet Interrupt (2015), published by Belladonna* Collaborative. Ungovernable, Olivares' second full-length book of poetry, is forthcoming in 2021 from YesYes Books. Olivares is a queer, mixed American-Cuban poet and educator from the Bronx in New York City. Olivares earned an MFA from Brooklyn College in Poetry and a BA from Amherst College in Interdisciplinary Studies (Education). Olivares was a 2019 AAWW Witness Program Fellow, a 2019 Finalist for the Jerome Foundation Artist Grant, and the recipient of a 2020 BRIO Award in Poetry, 2018 BRIO Award in Nonfiction, a 2015-2016 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Residency, and two Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grants (2014 and 2010). Olivares was recently a visiting faculty member in the Rutgers-Newark poetry MFA program.

Reviews

[Anatoly Molotkov · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Nation is complex inside us. What is nation but blood. The bloods in me all make different noises." Christina Olivares's powerful and multifaceted collection investigates a totalitarian past, immigrant identity, and how to live a meaningful and responsible life in an empire. Moving and masterful.