Mele - by Kalehua Kim (Paperback)

About the Book

"Mele, by Kalehua Kim, embodies the meaning of the word "mele" - a Hawaiian song or chant traditionally used to preserve history through the oral tradition. Winner of the Trio House Press Editor's Choice Prize, Kim's debut collection evokes modes of language and culture that shape the contours of memory and expose the fault lines of family and self, as well as the grace and generosity of healing, acknowledgement, and commemoration."--Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

Mele, by Kalehua Kim, embodies the meaning of the word "mele" - a Hawaiian song or chant traditionally used to preserve history through the oral tradition. Winner of the Trio House Press Editor's Choice Prize, Kim's debut collection evokes modes of language and culture that shape the contours of memory and expose the fault lines of family and self, as well as the grace and generosity of healing, acknowledgement, and commemoration. The poems reflect on what we inherit and how who we become is intertwined with who our parents were and are, and the pain of facing that reality: "One day your voice will become mine, Ka leo o maua/Though I am not prepared for your end..." With this mele, Kim honors the memory of a lost mother, as well as the struggles of a daughter as she becomes a wife and mother herself, while honoring her roots and forging a new path.

Review Quotes

"Singing with the manifold tongues of the ʻāina, Kalehua Kim gives us mana from the depths of her heart and of the heart of Hawaiʻi nei. Beautiful!"

-Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior

"To read Kalehua Kim's Mele is to sing through the mossy tendrils of grief - each poem a lush, shell-echoed invocation. Full of visceral language, lyrical rhythm, and expansive form, these poems are layered with matrilineal love, dreamscapes, familial sonnets, contrapuntals, generational choruses, elegies, and tender interiority. Reading Mele is like pressing a plump poem to your face: 'I roll the mango over my face we are cheek to cheek my mother and me oh, the ripeness of memory.' Speaking across earthly and ancestral worlds, Kim's poems feel like offerings, replete with chickens and yams and radiating care. This is an evocative collection I will be returning to often, opening up each valve of my heart like 'slices of sea cucumber strewn on the ocean floor, / waiting to multiply.'"

-Jane Wong, author of Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City

A first book of rare clarity and meticulous care, Mele honors the duality of inheritance. Each of its lines carries the irreducible beauty of what's been passed down from mother to daughter. But inheritance, generated in part through loss, is also responsibility. Mele transforms obligation into the gift of continuance, keeping love in circulation through remembered story and fresh new song. "this is how I hold you now," Kalehua Kim writes to her mother, though these large-hearted poems hold all their loved ones with quiet passion, grace, good humor, and just enough side eye to keep it real.

-Brian Teare, author of Poem Bitten by a Man

An empty bowl, a heavy whetstone, the keloid of a scar-I finished Mele carrying images of such lyric exactness that I was reminded once again of poetry's fundamental work of mourning and singing. In poems that map out the grief that comes from a central loss, Kalehua Kim gives new stories for the oldest of things-mothers and mothering, family and place, memory and language. "I write poems. I write poems where I can touch you," a speaker says to a beloved in one poem, affirming the fierceness of each poem in Mele as an act of holding, an act of devotion.

-Rick Barot, author of Moving the Bones