Ocean Mother

“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.” “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.” “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.” “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.”

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.