On the Line
by Kamala Platt
978-0-916727-69-7 Cost: $16.00
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Critical Praise for On the Line
- This book begins with the immigrant farmers of Kansas and a Mennonite poet of mixed origins, "on the border--less than one quarter." The Kansas borderland "is no escape route"--here the poet negotiates her independence, her commitment, her sense of companionship. She shudders under the crack of a bomber as it splits a wooded valley and contemplates teenage suicide pacts while sitting alone in a parked car in the sand hills. Both a cosmopolitan and a local resident wherever she lives, she serves witness against war and bloodshed but refuses to suspend her love of the natural world and the sustenance it brings in a fast for peace. Measured, wise, and lyrical, these poems constitute a hard-won testament.
— John Crawford, Activist & Publisher, West End Press
- This is a wonderful book of poetry by a gifted writer with a global vision. Kamala Platt manages to get us past the check-points, whether in Palestine or in the borderlands of the United States, her lyrical voice guiding us to places we otherwise might not go.
— Demetria MartÃnez, author of Mother Tongue and Confessions of a Berlitz-Tape Chicana
Reviews
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No Boundaries, Only Humanity
San Antonio Express-NewsMay 23, 2010
Reviewed by Marian Aitches
"Put yourself where it blows" (from the first poem, "Wind is Spirit," in San Antonio poet Kamala Platt's new collection) — and you will feel the clean wind of the Kansas prairie, the wide arms of the author, as you move through this wise book. Some people live life a bit larger than most of us; Kamala Platt is such a woman.
Platt opens the door to her journeys across time, space, culture and body — and the reader rides these stories like a train traveling over many borders: India and Africa to the cottonwoods of Kansas, despedida (farewell) in Austin, El Westside in San Anto; Prairie Sand Hills of Ohio to the South Land of Mexico; Meadowlark Sanctuary to New York City.
Platt's is the voice of experience, not easy observation. When the speaker of one poem says, "The green is denser than jungle this year," she recalls another land where "my brother and I walked through ferns and bamboo."
This autobiographical collection draws the reader into communion with a woman who embodies the reality that "leben en la frontera (living on the border) is a state of permanent flux." Platt offers these poems as testimonio to the struggle of embracing multiple heritages, crossing geographical, cultural and sexual borders.
It's never simple. "The Mennonite in me, like the woman/was taught the art of endurance," of passive resistance like hunger strikes. But the activist knows, "It's time to evoke another side of my ancestry," the Deacon "whose gun over the threshold/marked a safe zone for African/American on the freedom train."
While finely drawn details tie her stories to specific places, Platt's words call out connections across individual borders. The desire to be in peace with a loved one: "I wish this Saturday morning/there were someone in bed beside me/to listen to the way I breathe in my sleep."
Other poems express the need to find home through connection to place. And others the importance of community: "I am with you," a professor reassures a student who has dropped out. "write back and let me know where we are."
Platt's poems, as the women one speaker describes, "draw maps that will one day open dreams/into new stands of wilderness." In times like these, when "the young must bury their lovers/before their grandparents," Platt testifies against unnatural acts of violence from rape to war. And in "Strange Fruit Hangs Once Again in Texas," the poet bears witness to an unjust execution.
Many poems examine the shortsighted degradation of the wondrous natural world Platt never fails to celebrate.
Kamala Platt's inheritance is not simply ethnic; it is ethical. A resounding achievement of this collection is the claiming of one woman's role in her family's multigenerational dance against injustice.
Artist and activist, she seeks to traverse all checkpoints and borders, from the Lacandon jungle to Palestine, Iraq — and those walls we don't often acknowledge: "like here,/on occupied land." Refusing to be confined by nationality, Platt mixes "fresh mint from my father's garden/with dry mint from Egypt and serve my guests."
In the Afterword, Platt claims this book as "a testimonio of time, place and people I've chosen to embrace with words." These poems embrace all who strive to live "on the line." Platt inspires all of us to sharpen and enlarge our lives, to balance well — head up, eyes open — on the line that joins human to humanity.
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Marian Aitches teaches American Studies at UTSA, is the author of two collections of poetry, the first of which, Fishing for Light, won the 2009 Wings Press Joanie Whitebird Chapbook Award. Ours Is a Flower was recently released by Pecan Grove Press.
About This Author
Read more about Kamala Platt HERE.