Karen Llagas's ALL OF US ARE CLEAVED explores how we are shaped by the connections we form and are thrusted upon us. From the intimate spaces of marriage and family to the wider experiences of migration, political engagement and a global pandemic, these poems assert that we are simultaneously taken apart and put back together: by our individual efforts, yes, but also by our collective grace. "Within All Of Us Are Cleaved a language of love & forgiveness emerges from the mother wound & the deepest wound of colonization. The lyric of the word blooms within this collection of poems--as your body merges with the work you begin to understand the purpose of love. Here an intimacy of poetics-- each poem moving through life as life naturally does through the personal to the outer that resembles all of us. Here we rest our cheek on each other's body, un abrazo fuerte enveloping each other--medicine that is a balm-- like the Vicks rubbed on your chest cuando eramos niÒos--here a poetics of intimacy that equals the history of each others' flesh."--Lourdes Figueroa, author of the chapbook VUELTA "Karen Llagas' much-anticipated new collection is a fresh rendering of movement, memory, and lineation. Pay close attention to space and structure, to permeability and deliberate acts of grace. Just as there are many paths to excavating lost places and histories, the speaker in these poems takes us on an imagistic journey to rituals of grieving and cleaving (a 'thirst for salt and mud'), to fields of sugarcane and the many kinds of poverty and privilege, always in proximity to the smallest of bodies--bees, spiders, yeast, rice grains, origins. ('Do you know a rosebud/ that refuses/ to bloom is called a bullet?') These are, at once, field notes and love poems, unsentimental and unimpeachable."--Aileen Cassinetto, Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow "As the contronym in the title suggests, Llagas's poems grapple with the inherent contradictions that complicate and enrich human existence, and signal the oppositions that can divide us should our vigilance in interrogating their historically-and culturally-constructed assumptions wane. Rather than goad us to take sides or force a reconciliation among such oppositions, Llagas's poems thrive at the intersections, revealing and enlarging the tensions among identities and allegiances, and in doing so create a new space--a more empathetic and giving space-- for individual, interpersonal, and interrelational exchange. As the speake