PILAR CHRISTIANA GRAHAM

Poet and Essayist

Currents encompasses land, sea, and sky. The cosmic instinct of these poems is to lift themselves from the page as it explores within the silence and white space, found in traditional Chinese landscape paintings. Earthly and sensual tensions live beneath the poems, moving feverishly toward dreams, myth, and madness. The poems stretch towards the unexpected, resulting in the reader having to “work to undress” the poems amongst a landscape within the construct of deep imagery.  This collection of poems is strangely brave, while it beautifully and consciously submerges into desire, vulnerability, and loss in order to face survival.  The psychological nature of the poems, seen and unseen, is a fearless navigation within the outer dimensions of the abstract, while it intentionally cascades toward the magical, and ultimately, charts courses straight into the headwinds of mortality and beyond. 


Pilar Christiana Graham’s poetry is the music of mermaids singing.  Following their currents, we hear silences, and we hear sounds. We’re taken to sea-places.  And now and again, we land.  
Beautiful.  True.   

— Maxine Hong Kingston