Rena J. Mosteirin

Disaster Tourism is out now from BOA Editions. Here's what people are saying about it:

"Disaster Tourism is a work of riotous, rigorous fathoming. Sensuous, renunciatory. Needfully disorienting. So we go careening into the quiet shocks of Mosteirin's strange and crystal vision, death riven and yet alive with the urgency of its saying." —aracelis girmay, author of the black maria

"Disaster Tourism tallies the horrors and consequences of a darkening millennium as if through a tourist's camera, gobbling greedily whatever there is.  The snapshots are also the slideshow, a hauntingly eager trip through a nation increasingly determined to dehumanize women, celebrate violence, and careen off an oncoming cliff. Of any stranger, one can say, at best, 'I was wrong to fear them but not wrong to fear.' How to live with it all? How to go on? Disaster Tourism also demonstrates an unyielding love for the world and for other people, even if 'Love costs too much.'" —Craig Morgan Teicher, author of Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey

"In Rena Mosteirin's Disaster Tourism, the poet undergoes a process of self-examination as she sees and re-sees the self from myriad perspectives and angles. This is a book for our times, noting as it does the varieties of brutality, but also the ways in which we learn to carry on despite the injustices we and others must endure.  The poet finds herself in different cities, different places and houses, and in each location, the poet renders experience into meaning by deploying her great lyrical gifts. This is a collection full of surprises brought on by a tough mind, and an open, indelible heart." —Mark Wunderlich, author of God of Nothingness

"The poems in Disaster Tourism all share proximity to the ocean that 'breathes itself back into you,' whether literal or the metaphorical fathoms of grief, disenfranchisement and reinvent elegy. Rena J. Mosteirin is tender for us, turns her 'eye hurt by too much love' to beloveds and ancestors in a collection with keen humor and generosity." —Carmen Gimenez, author of Be Recorder