7 Days and Nights in the Desert (Tracing the Origin)
by Sabrina Dalla Valle
Kelsey Street Press, 2013
88 pages / $13.00 buy from Kelsey Street Press

1. Sabrina Dalla Valle is an alchemist, a sorceress, scribe.

2. The role of poet as spell-caster/magician/mystic is seen through these pages. If it’s not clear, how can I say this?

3. everything is indication of moisture in a landscape– not just density of species, but also the shape of the earth.

4. How to propagate a landscape?

5. While reading Dalla Valle’s book I recall being ten years old, casting my first spell.

6. Poetry should transmutate; cause a change from one form, nature, substance, or state into another. In other words to transform the temporal existence.

7. as if not yet fully human

8. Meditation requires practice. There’s an alchemy at work here in these lines

9. Reflect upon the nuances of the question of: what gives us life?

10. like filaments

11. writing is read by the dream

12. I ordered feverfew and other herbs from a catalogue and had it shipped via Cash on Delivery (C.O. D.), a service that no longer exists

13. At the skin of your breath is poetry

14.       Photons are their mirror

             photons can change into each other:

             presence into image, image into presence.

             but they can form into mirror planets

             and even mirror stars

15. My mother wrote the mailman a check

16. Poems are the path of veins. There’s a ________________ at work here

17. Like poems representing metals

18. Meditation requires practice

19. the principle of combustibility contained within the artist’s line

20. has been swelling in my stomach

21. the charge between two words passed back and forth between lovers

22. can touch you

23. can touch

24. embroidered sky

25. If I reach out far enough I can touch that ten-year-old self through the fickle of curved stars

Mg Roberts’ bio:

Born in Subic Bay, Philippines, Mg Roberts teaches writing in the San Francisco Bay area.  She is the author of not so, sea (Durga Press, 2014), a Kundiman Fellow, and Kelsey Street Press member. Her work has appeared in the Stanford Journal of Asian American Studies, Bombay Gin, Web Conjunctions, and elsewhere. She’s currently working on an anthology of critical essays on avant-garde writing for/by writers of color.