Charity E. Yoro’s “ten-cent flower & other territories”

I collaborated as designer, publication consultant and contributing editor on this poetry collection from First Matter Press. ten-cent flower & other territories explores what is lost in lineage, translation, transaction, and seeks reclamation through mapping. Through etymologies of place names and monuments and godheads to navigating complex geographies of mother/daughter, lover/other, colonizer/colonized; from ledger of transgressions to passage through birth canal, with quiet defiances against autocorrect, capitalization. It is a collection of constellation, origin story, futures, says author Charity E. Yoro about her debut poetry collection. Cover art by Portland collage artist Lara Rouse.

ten-cent flower & other territories

AVAILABLE @ BOOKSHOP.ORG + OTHER BOOKSELLERS

Written by Charity E. Yoro
Paperback | 98 pages | September 2023
Published by First Matter Press

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FROM THE BACK COVER

“Charity Yoro's poems astonish-carefully wrought yet equally wild. Navigating the tensions between beauty, commodity and place, they perform a richly textured quick-step that is bold, sly, funny, tender, fierce. But it is Yoro's dexterity and inventiveness with form that allows her work to be both a brilliant means as well as an outcome of exploration into personal and cultural trauma; expressed anger and restraint; loss and reclamation; the experience of time; aesthetics as a political act; invisibility and strength. These poems move in surprising ways, guided by an intelligence that is adept at making thinking a deeply emotional and sensuous act."
—Michele Glazer, author of Oregon Book Award Finalist fretwork

“Charity E. Yoro's ten-cent flower & other territories sets the notion of Hawai'i as a 'taste of paradise' alongside the acknowledgment that this homeland is 'a museum of pretty / stolen things.' In this collection that is at once searing and tender, Yoro reckons with the effects of conquest and tourism on the islands, writing of and through erasure, interruption, and displacement. This question of legacies-what painful histories and what gifts the coming generations will inherit from us-is at the heart of ten-cent flower & other territories. Through poems that range in form from haiku to crosswords to abecedarian primers, Yoro asks us to consider the urgency of language: what words will offer those who come after us, and will these words tell the truth of our histories, in all their terrors and delights?"
—Jennifer Perrine, author of Again & No Confession, No Mass

“Fifty years ago the Hawaiian activist and comedian Kehau Lee Jackson said, ‘Our country is being plasticized, cheapened, and exploited.’ Charity Yoro’s piquant, gorgeous first collection, ten-cent flower and other territories, documents the personal and social toll of this continuing disenfranchisement, as it hauntingly delineates vistas and cityscapes from Bangkok to Hawai'i and the U.S. mainland. ‘Fractal, webbed,’ Yoro’s intricate and inventive poems flash with memorable phrasings, imagining into being a ‘territory of unmastered language.’ It’s not a book for tourists. Readers who attend closely to its ‘sunken moon prayers,’ though, will find a new voice of rare insight, commitment, and beauty.”
—John Beer, author of The Waste Land and Other Poems

“In this astonishing achievement of a book, Charity Yoro expands the artistic repertoire of poetry with refreshing self-awareness, technical dexterity, and grace. Whether working in inherited forms, found forms, or invented ones, Yoro's writing is marked by a singularity of voice and vision.  She is clearly a rising star in the contemporary literary landscape.”  
—Kristina Marie Darling, author of Daylight Has Already Come & X Marks the Dress: A Registry