Overview

The Red We Silk collects inherited migrations and the weight of familial journeys into a lyric investigation of displacement and longing. Memory abides in the body and the body in memory, propelling the speaker through geographical and spiritual landscapes, desires, and griefs toward the transformative work of discovery. Tender, attentive, and multivocal, these are poems of belonging beyond borders.

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9781930508613

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Reviews

""The Red We Silk is an impressive debut that captures with elegance and ease the truly twenty-first century phenomenon of multiple migrations and cultural intersections as they manifest in the body of a gifted poet. Nicole Lachat frames these considerations within the Peruvian myth of Chasqui, who becomes for her a migrant voicing the poetic implications of uprooting and replanting in different spaces. Lachat's brilliantly generous poems of deep sentiment and spiritual interrogation explore themes of family, memory, place, and desire with resonant beauty."" - Kwame Dawes ""Reader, this is no ordinary debut. Nicole Lachat knows that all borders are lies. Citizen and immigrant. Land and body. Parent and child. The quick and the dead. Whatever lines you believe in, whatever lines you draw, prepare to have them dissolved. 'Because you come / ready for war—swearing lightning, swearing / thunder—I come light-footed. I become / leaf.' Lachat is here to say that no onehas the right to divide us, not even us, that our survival depends on this: knowing we are each other, knowing we can still become our softest selves. The Red We Silk will change you."" - Rebecca Gayle Howell ""In this timely debut, Nicole Lachat's lyric verve shapes the very ground of ordinary living into a personal history that threads memory with an urgent desire for bonds that survive and transform the temporal, emotional, and otherwise disfiguring work of distance. Arresting and smashing."" - Canisia Lubrin

Author Information

Nicole Lachat was born in Edmonton, Canada, to a Peruvian mother and Swiss father. She holds an MFA in creative writing from New York University and recently earned a PhDin English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her work has appeared in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Ruminate Magazine, One by Jacar Press, Birdfeast, The Puerto Rico Review, and Poets.org, among others. She was awarded the 2022 Wilbur Gaffney Poetry Prize through the Academy of American Poets and received a 2024 Individual Arts Fellowship through the Nebraska Arts Council. Lachat is a Banff Arts Centre fellow.

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