Catena Poetica: An International Collaboration by Flor Aguilera, Joyce Brinkman, Gabriele Glang, and Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda

If technology means any set of skills, methods and processes that help humans carry out their goals, then it should also be possible for us to think of poetry as a form of technology. How else to explain how the words of those who lived and wrote hundreds of years ago still offer their potent magic and understanding to us today? An amazement: that we can enter into this bright chain of conversation, ranging back to when our "[a]ncient ancestors wondered who/ carried the sun" and "called it forth/ from the darkness of its hiding place." This is exactly what poets Flor Aguilera, Joyce Brinkman, Gabriele Glang, and Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda do in this international poetic collaboration called Catena Poetica. Following in the tradition of collaborative poetry such as renku or renga, they add their own distinctive shapes and sounds. Back and forth, between Mexico, the US Midwest and East Coast, and Germany- in these poems they circulate the warmth of color and spice, the mysteries of music, water, and clouds. What comes to us is more than the well-made thing: it's alchemy.

-Luisa A. Igloria, author of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts and Ode to the Heart Smaller 

than a Pencil Eraser; Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia, 2020-22

Reading these poems we sense the cycles of seasons and natural sceneries. We see visual snapshots enlarged by subtle words and reflections. Still-life contemplations that narrate our own mindscape.

-Dr. Helmut Haberkamm, author of Frankn lichd nedd am Meer

In Catena Poetica, four voices unite in a shared vision of form, theme, and music. Readers encounter folk artifacts from Andean charangos to guqins, or artists and composers ranging from Mondrian to Couperin, but the poetry's essence is firmly rooted in nature-a tribute to the poetic tradition that brought forth this original form. Traces of distinctive imaginations, geographies, and cultures course throughout, and yet the aggregate reflects one aesthetic light "in its irresistible wholeness." This compendium reminds us why collaboration is so essential in our multifaceted world.

-Jessica Reed, Author of World Composed