The University of Arizona Press
Chamorrita Song
Paperback ($18.00), Ebook ($18.00)
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For poet and spoken-word artist Danielle P. Williams, Kantan Chamorrita is more than just the ancient craft of Chamorro folk song. It is also a return and a homecoming. This impromptu style of communal call-and response performance art forms the spokes for Williams’s debut collection.
Rooted in oral tradition, Chamorrita Song pays homage to Black and Chamorro cultures, honoring the artistic expressions that these communities have created to reconcile lifetimes of imposed trauma. Bearing witness to these many narratives, Williams intertwines spoken word poetry and gospel music with Chamorro storytelling, weaving together the nuanced histories of queer, Black, and Indigenous existence and literature.
Here Williams reveals capacious contemporary forms that speak to the future as well as to the past and that further ground lineages in homelands, finding strength and beauty in collective pain and triumph. These poems transform and spread the messages of those long silenced. They act as song and prayer.
Rooted in oral tradition, Chamorrita Song pays homage to Black and Chamorro cultures, honoring the artistic expressions that these communities have created to reconcile lifetimes of imposed trauma. Bearing witness to these many narratives, Williams intertwines spoken word poetry and gospel music with Chamorro storytelling, weaving together the nuanced histories of queer, Black, and Indigenous existence and literature.
Here Williams reveals capacious contemporary forms that speak to the future as well as to the past and that further ground lineages in homelands, finding strength and beauty in collective pain and triumph. These poems transform and spread the messages of those long silenced. They act as song and prayer.
“This collection is a profound and melodic song that explores the complexities of being a queer, diasporic Black Pacific Islander woman. Throughout, Williams composes formally innovative poems that praise her multiple languages, lineages, and belongings.”—Craig Santos Perez, author of Navigating CHamoru Poetry
“Danielle P. Williams confesses that she wants to be ‘in two languages / at once,’ and she excellently does this while also creating a third language: one of Black Indigenous intimacy that asks other Black Indigenous kin to ‘tell the world about yourself.’ By merging spoken word with formalist traditions and Black gospel with Chamorro stories, Williams teaches us to make song and politics out of fury, experience, and ancestral dreams. Chamorrita Song is a debut in avant-garde and spoken poetics.”—Alan Pelaez Lopez, editor of When Language Broke Open: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent
"The Mariana Islands claims a long line of Chamorro versemakers and storytellers. To this tradition, Danielle P. Williams adds a measure of Black gospel to create this wholly original debut collection.”—Matt Sutherland, Foreword Reviews
“Danielle P. Williams confesses that she wants to be ‘in two languages / at once,’ and she excellently does this while also creating a third language: one of Black Indigenous intimacy that asks other Black Indigenous kin to ‘tell the world about yourself.’ By merging spoken word with formalist traditions and Black gospel with Chamorro stories, Williams teaches us to make song and politics out of fury, experience, and ancestral dreams. Chamorrita Song is a debut in avant-garde and spoken poetics.”—Alan Pelaez Lopez, editor of When Language Broke Open: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent
"The Mariana Islands claims a long line of Chamorro versemakers and storytellers. To this tradition, Danielle P. Williams adds a measure of Black gospel to create this wholly original debut collection.”—Matt Sutherland, Foreword Reviews
90 Pages
7 x 9
Published: January 2026Paperback ISBN: 9780816555161
Published: January 2026Ebook ISBN: 9780816555178