Ocean Mother - by Arielle Taitano Lowe (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Ocean Mother tells the story of a young woman's decision to heal herself, her family, and her home. The poet gives voice to her experience as a CHamoru girl raised in the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam), located in Micronesia. Weaving together narratives of family, environment, Indigenous identity, decolonial love, and her CHamoru culture, the poet goes on a journey inward and overseas. She explores the relationships between culture and identity, colonialism and inherited trauma, sense of place and generational healing.

Review Quotes

"Arielle Taitano Lowe's first book of verse, Ocean Mother, is filled with currents that move like water, crossing bloodlines, seas, timelines, and histories. Lowe's words cast spells of healing stories as traditions realign in these pages. This is a beautiful and powerful book."

"Born of Lowe's deep guinaiya for her island, her people, and her culture, this book marks the emergence of an important famalao'an voice in CHamoru poetry and in Pacific poetry, one firmly committed to truth-telling and the healing power of our ocean."

"In this haunting debut collection, Arielle Taitano Lowe sifts through a 'graveyard of Indigenous traditions' to reclaim poem by poem CHamoru culture, and word by word its own language. The author is 'soul fishing.' Readers will be grateful to be invited along."

"With poems like shards of sea glass, Lowe is searching for a home, a mother, a song. A debut full of sea, sky, and promise."

About the Author

Arielle Taitano Lowe is a Chamorrita poet, born and raised in Guam. She grew up swimming with schools of palaksi off the shores of luminao reef in Apapa, Piti. Her work has been featured in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, Under a Warm Green Linden, Indigenous Pacific Islander Eco-Literatures, and Indigenous Literatures from Micronesia. She now resides in O'ahu, Hawai'i, where she studies intergenerational healing.