Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater (Poetry, 2017)


Marvin Bell, author of Nightworks; Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems; Whiteout, a collaboration with photographer Nathan Lyons; and After the Fact: Scripts & Postscripts. Former Iowa Poet Laureate Sam Roxas-Chua 姚 is a natural. He is an exciting and original poet of profound imagination that can lift off from any situation…an artist through and through.

Tyehimba Jess, author of Leadbelly (Wave, 2005) and Olio (Wave, 2016); Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry | Sam Roxas-Chua 姚’s poetry is swirling and galactic, vividly sensual, and delightfully stubborn in its refusal to entertain simple answers to queries of blood, faith, and desire. Surreal yet rooted in palpable color and history, this poet’s vision transcends oceans, blends geographies and bleeds a multi-tongued heritage for us to better find ourselves. We need more maps like this in the world, and cartographers of language like Sam Roxas Chua 姚.

Joseph Stroud, author of Signatures (1982); Below Cold Mountain (1998); Country of Light (2004), a finalist for the 2005 Northern California Book Critics Award; and Of This World: New and Selected Poems (2008). Awarded the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award | Every now and then a unique, distinctive voice will appear on the literary scene, as if from out of nowhere. Such is the case with Sam Roxas-Chua 姚. His mysterious poems teem with apparitions of the marvelous, as if we have entered some other dimension. His imagination is haunted by family and the primal scene, with ancestral spirits from China and the Philippines. Here are poems that push the boundaries of language, that shimmer with almost a mythic or visionary quality, poems that encounter what he calls “luminous questions.” There is such a richness and amplitude in his work. The poems in Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater will take you on a journey to where you have never been before.