Poems for the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names

In this artfully crafted collection, Soraya Mariam Peerbaye leaps onto the stage with aplomb. She examines how naming expresses our relationship with each other and the natural world and how meaning is affected when there is no permanent human settlement to remember names.

Binding her book into three segments, she explores in exquisite detail the concrete and the ephemeral — objects of play, profession, and hobbies. Here is a poetic treatise on the semantics of naming and gesture; how they can express possession and power over another, or kinship, inquisitiveness, openness, mercy, and love. This astonishing sequence of poems moves from the tip of South America to the Antarctic and back, with a lightness of being in the floating world of incisive language.