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Though “Healing cannot be / produced by a single / member of the colony” Lucianna Chixaro Ramos’ breathtaking—breath-giving—debut collection offers an effective way forward into the kind of embodied and collective emotional intelligence that brings better health. Quietly revolutionary, nourishingly radical: “If it no longer matters to be / quiet, compliant // then”—this book is for you.—LAURA MULLEN, author of Complicated Grief
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The composer John Cage was famous for saying that art should imitate nature in its manner of operation. Ramos’s Cells questions and complicates that idea, presenting the beehive as a trope for all sorts of thorny constraints and limitations—in the workplace, at national borders, within economic models, in poetic form itself. In our various cells, must we always serve a Queen? Must we forever have a Keeper? If so, how can we break free? This stunning collection urges us to imagine more nourishing forms of life.—JENA OSMAN, author of Motion Studies
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As visual poetry cells, these black/white forms are swerves and holders, counter-page planets. What’s a book of poetry, exactly? Cells never falls into suspect “superorganism” status or becomes its own self-extraction device; rather, it expands into a half-hidden and raging thing called “queen” that’s not quite the poet. Something monstrous called “Keeper”—also not quite the poet. Each, like (text) and (image) here, “selectively permeable.” What a debut. Ouch.—TERRI WITEK, author of Something’s Missing in the Museum
