Last Days - by Tamiko Beyer (Paperback)

About the Book

"Last Days is a practice of radical imagination for our current political and environmental crises. It excavates the conditions that have brought us here-white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, corporate power, capitalism-and calls ancestors, birds, organizers, and lovers to conjure a new world. It explores how to transform our future to be more beautiful, more just, and more compassionate than we can imagine. Social-justice poems interrogate positions of white privilege and racial oppression from a vantage of a mixed-race woman"--

Book Synopsis

Last Days is a practice of radical imagination for our current political and environmental crises. It excavates the conditions that have brought us hereâ "white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, corporate power, capitalismâ "and calls ancestors, birds, organizers, and lovers to conjure a new world. It explores how to transform our future to be more beautiful, more just, and more compassionate than we can imagine.

Review Quotes

"At this moment in history, a singular question often arises: what happens to the self and to the group when a keen part of ourself is the Other? Tamiko Beyer allows the question to be complex because, for her, even being human has its Otherness. In the phrase 'slip // of boundaries' ('Estuaries'), we are introduced early in the collection to a staff that may assist in climbing into and along with these gorgeous poems, some of which 'slip' form from Western open verse to authentically realized haiku and haibun. The slip is also identity from mixed race to queer to class to human; the slip is language as well as poeticsâ "especially for those in Japanese forms; and it is that abiding psychological Freudian slip. (And perhaps, a female garment, given Beyerâ (TM)s playfulness!) And, then there is location, whether subterranean or alternate. Enter into this collection of Last Days and enjoy powerful discoveries in her crossings and lines." â "Kimiko Hahn, author of Foreign Bodies

About the Author

Tamiko Beyer is the author of Last Days (Alice James Books, 2021), We Come Elemental (Alice James Books, 2013), and two chapbooks of poems. Her work has been published in Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, Idaho Review, Literary Hub, the Rumpus, Hyphen, Dusie, and elsewhere. She publishes Starlight & Strategy, a monthly newsletter for living life wide awake and shaping change. She has received awards, fellowships, and residencies from PEN America, Kundiman, Hedgebrook, VONA, and the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund, among others. A social justice communications writer and strategist, she spends her days writing truth to power.