The University of Arizona Press
Grief for the Green That Was
Moving tenderly across memory, continents, and literary forms, Jacob Shores-Argüello’s tightly woven cross-genre collection evolves a private family bereavement into an exploration of collective ecological grief. Following the death of his mother, the speaker navigates between his Costa Rican heritage and his Oklahoma upbringing, eventually arriving at something like healing on the banks of New Zealand’s Whanganui River—the first river in the world granted legal personhood.
Structured around a Spanish nursery rhyme, Grief for the Green That Was finds solace in the prospect of citizenship for a more-than-human world, a possibility it approaches through perspectival shifts and innovative forms—including footnoted poems, hybrid fiction, and an experimental choose-your-own-adventure sequence—that overturn lyric and storytelling conventions.
A book about what we inherit and what we leave behind, both in families and in landscapes, Grief for the Green That Was examines how climate change affects not just the physical world but also our emotional and spiritual relationships to place. Here Shores-Argüello creates a new language for twenty-first-century grief that refuses to separate the personal from the planetary.
“‘When my mother died, I was without boundary,’ writes Jacob Shores-Argüello in this deeply personal and insightfully political book. Grieving for the loss of his mother and the loss brought on by capitalism, colonialism, and climate change, Shores-Argüello maps a transnational Latinx experience from Costa Rica to Oklahoma while connecting to Indigenous communities and activism globally. This encompassing and compassionate poetics—one in which the poet finds ‘everything is citizen around me’—poignantly urges us to retune our senses and re-embrace our world in all its interconnected wonder.”—Brandon Som, author of Tripas
“This book dissolves all borders—of nation and self, human and animal, form and language, memory and make-believe. We enter this book searching, searching for home, and in the end, the only home to find, the only one we ever had, is migration itself, change itself. This book is shockingly wise, funny, and full of mourning—a wake for our delusions. Jacob Shores-Argüello is a true original.”—Rebecca Gayle Howell, translator of The Belly of the Whale
“In Grief for the Green That Was, Jacob Shores-Argüello sings a poignant elegy / eulogy // elogio / elegía, yet witnesses the slow growth of naïveté into new life: glasswing butterflies become citizen pollinators, a river in New Zealand earns personhood. Amid rivers of fog and forests of cloud, beneath skies the color of rum, among hillsides bejeweled by coffee cherries bright as rubies, the speaker transforms himself into a citizen of grief, un huérfano // vidente / ciudadano de este mundo y del siguiente.”—Diego Báez, author of Yaguareté White
“In his formally adventurous and bold Grief for the Green That Was, Jacob Shores-Argüello shows us that he is a poet of place who interrogates the distance between home and our memory of it. But nostalgia is not his mode; rather, longing is, a longing for what time inevitably destroys.”—Tomás Q. Morin, author of My Favorite Things
“The Pan-American Highway connects a once rural coffee-growing town in Costa Rica with a small city in the plains of Oklahoma. Grief for the Green That Was is a family story between these two points, with migration as the headwater from which these river-poems flow, and memory the landing place for umbilical climates and personal grief.”—G. A. Chaves, author of Wallau
“Grief for the Green That Was is a spellbinding testament to what remains when memory becomes an act of survival. Jacob’s poems shimmer with beauty, hard-earned wisdom, and a palpable desire to understand the hows and whys of ‘Mother grief, motherland grief’: a sorrow that lives in the body, across oceans, here and there. They insist that even in the most vulnerable places—an eroding riverbank, a hospital café, a family cemetery—something stubborn and green still grows.”—Marcus Wicker, author of DEAR MOTHERSHIP and Silencer
