Pre-order: Mele by Kalehua Kim

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 How to Not be Afraid of Everything and Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City