Pigafetta is My Wife

by Joe Hall

Poetry. PIGAFETTA IS MY WIFE enters the crisis that is the love between the colonizer and the colonized. These poems fragment the journals of Antonio Pigafetta, a 16th Century traveler who recorded Magellan's hellish circumnavigation of the globe, while tracking a present-day speaker and his beloved as they are distanced and reunited across the map. Along the way we visit historical moments including a botched circumcision as performance art, the Rape of Nanking, and 17th century missionaries in the Philippines. Through this intertwining of narratives the book reveals how the past and present are visceral beasts caught in a cycle of passion and destruction. Like an epic murder ballad, Hall moves from collage to epistle, suffering to ecstasy, while pinpointing what is at stake in the pursuit of love and the dismantling of the self.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 2010

About the author

Joe Hall is the author of five books of poetry, including Someone's Utopia (2018) and Fugue & Strike (forthcoming). His poems, reviews, and scholarship have appeared in Poetry Daily, The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Postcolonial Studies, Peach Mag, terrain.org, PEN America Blog, Poetry Northwest, Ethel Zine, Gulf Coast, Best Buds! Collective, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction. He has taught poetry workshops for teachers, teens, and workers through Just Buffalo and the WNYCOSH Worker Center.

http://www.blackocean.org/hall/

Reviews

[Joe]

This is my book. I like it fine.

[Mary Overton]

the whale bursts through the waves & swallows the circling rook
the rook flies through the corridors of the whale &
into its heart, eats it
& lives there

We cut giant slabs of flesh from the whale

& find the rook at its core, like a pearl in a pumpkin

The rook has teeth, black skin, white feathers. It & its eggs are also good to eat
(pg. 9)

[Daniel]

gorgeous book of poetry that inhabits several different spaces in time at the same time. meaning this book is both modern and ancient. the voice is adrift while being stuck in DC and the love is not really feasible, but it's pretty beautiful.

[Mark]

Some parts I liked:
"The king of China & his women can only be seen through a window in the breast of an enormous serpent."
"a chrysanthemum blossom sails across a bowl of milk."
"I fell to my knees on the dock &, because it was a dock, I kissed it."
"I'm bored with the territory of myself."
"I want more elaborate explanations of things."
"in gulf between fashion photographer, man circumcising himself for others' gratification & the skin"
"My father ignites my thigh via cell phone, the thigh closest to you."

[Aaron]

Wonderful poetry on a grand scale as a full book of poems tracks two courses of poems while tracking Antonio Pigafafetta and two distinct time periods.

A genuinely fine work, movingly beautifully between Magellan's voyage *(the circumnavigation)* , and a series of epistles..."
-Dan Beachy--Quick

"Almost impossibly grand in scope "Pigafetta is my wife" is a rare achievement and quite a debut"
-Sally Keith

76 sparsely written pages, I think it's impact is huge on me.

*()* -mine

I'd give it a 10 if I could
Aaron

ISBN 978-0-9844752-0-9

[Cody]

This collection was gorgeous and vibrant and all things that are good. Being that I am attending the same college of which Joe Hall is an alum, I am hell of intimidated by this book. This was so beautifully written. It also went way over my head and some of the poems were confusing to read- the structure on the page threw me on several of them, especially in the epilogue, "Disaster Shrines".

[Cary]

I finished reading this book for the first time about six months ago. I continue to finish this book every time I think about it. Like an important memory, I dig the sum, feeling the parts of the whole jostling inside, inserting little knives into the entire history of the world.

Amazing book. Amazing poems.

[Cheryl]

Best freakin' book in the world.

[Wade]

It's good. Word.

[Queer]

I left this on a plane. It fit the content if not the beauty of the form.

[Trey Harris]

5 million stars

[David Hall]

Well because Joe Hall wrote it.
It has to be good