From Unincorporated Territory [guma’] by Craig Santos Perez

Craig Santos Perez writes from a place that most American poetry has never visited: Guam, the westernmost territory of the United States, a 212-square-mile island in the Mariana archipelago that has been colonized continuously since 1668 and remains, technically, an “unincorporated territory” to this day. The word “unincorporated” does a great deal of work in these poems. It means that the U.S. Constitution does not fully apply. It means that the people of Guam are American nationals but not citizens by birthright. And in Perez’s hands, it becomes a poetic condition: a state of existing within and against a larger power that refuses to fully recognize your presence. “guma'” is the Chamoru word for home, and this fourth volume in the ongoing from Unincorporated Territory series circles that word with a devotion that is both intimate and politically urgent.

Perez began this serial project in 2008, and each volume has deepened the project’s scope. Where earlier installments focused heavily on the colonial history of Guam and the poet’s displacement as a Chamoru man living on the U.S. mainland, [guma’] turns inward toward family, fatherhood, and the specific grief of raising a child on stolen ecological time. The birth of Perez’s daughter catalyzes much of the collection, and her presence transforms the political into the tenderly personal without ever softening its edges. This is a book about what it means to build a home when the very concept of home has been disrupted by empire, and what it means to love a child into a world you know is changing for the worse.

The collection also marks Perez’s fullest engagement yet with ecopoetics. Climate change, ocean acidification, coral bleaching, and the specific vulnerabilities of Pacific island ecosystems move through these poems with the insistence of tide. Perez weaves together Chamoru creation narratives, NOAA climate data, personal lyric, and colonial documents into a form that refuses easy consolation. The result is a book that honors complexity: the complexity of identity, of geography, of environmental grief, and of love.

The Sequences and Structure

Perez organizes [guma’] through a signature formal approach that readers of earlier volumes will recognize: the “from” poem, a recursive structure that insists on incompleteness as a political stance. Nothing in this project claims to be finished or whole. The “from” in the title is not a preposition indicating origin but a signal that these poems are always excerpted from something larger, always partial, always pointing toward absences the reader must feel rather than fill. This formal gesture enacts what colonial history does to Indigenous cultures: it fragments, it interrupts, it leaves gaps where continuity should be.

Within that framework, Perez builds several interlocking sequences. The “ginen the [first world]” and “ginen the [second world]” sections move between Chamoru cosmology and contemporary ecological crisis, drawing parallels between origin stories and extinction narratives. The “Praise Song for Oceania” sequences function almost as liturgy, cataloguing the names of Pacific islands, birds, fish, and coral species with a reverence that doubles as elegy. Against these, the domestic poems about his daughter arrive with startling directness, their plainspokenness a deliberate contrast to the more fragmentary, collage-based work surrounding them. The juxtaposition is devastating in the best sense: the most personal becomes the most political precisely because of the context in which it sits.

The book’s architecture rewards rereading. Images and phrases recur across sections, accumulating meaning with each appearance. The word “guma'” itself acts as a kind of tuning fork, sounding differently each time it appears depending on what surrounds it. By the collection’s end, it has gathered so many resonances, domestic warmth, geographic longing, environmental fear, ancestral memory, that it feels less like a word than a field.

Imagery and Language

Perez writes in a style that borrows from multiple traditions without being reducible to any of them. His lineation is often fragmented, with white space doing heavy tonal work. He uses brackets throughout, not just in the title, to enclose words, phrases, and sometimes entire poems, creating a sense of annotation, of language under pressure, of meaning that needs to be held carefully because it might otherwise escape. The brackets also function as a typographic echo of the brackets around “guma'” in the title: they mark what is precious and what is threatened.

His imagery draws from two primary wells: the natural world of the Pacific and the bureaucratic language of colonialism. Coral reefs and typhoon seasons share the page with legal statutes, military base designations, and the cold taxonomies of environmental impact reports. The collision is never merely ironic. Perez uses it to show how the language of governance and extraction has shaped, distorted, and sometimes destroyed the language of belonging. When a NOAA bleaching alert appears in the same poem as a lullaby, the juxtaposition does not comment on itself; it simply holds two realities in proximity and trusts the reader to feel their weight.

The Chamoru language appears throughout, sometimes translated, sometimes not. This is a deliberate political choice. Chamoru was suppressed under both Spanish and American colonialism, and its presence in these poems is an act of recovery. Perez includes a glossary, but the poems do not depend on it. The untranslated Chamoru words function as a kind of remainder, something the poem holds that the reader may not fully access, a small formal enactment of the limits of any culture’s understanding of another.

Recurring Themes

Home is the gravitational center of this collection, but Perez examines it from every possible angle. There is the home he left (Guam), the home he inhabits (the U.S. mainland), the home his ancestors knew before colonization, and the home he hopes to build for his daughter. These versions of home do not resolve into one another; they remain in tension, and that tension generates the collection’s emotional charge. Perez is not interested in nostalgia. He is interested in the conditions that make full homecoming impossible, and in the stubborn human insistence on belonging despite those conditions.

Fatherhood enters the collection with real force. The poems addressed to or about his daughter are among the most moving in the series to date, and they carry a particular kind of dread: the dread of someone who knows too much about environmental futures and colonial histories to offer his child uncomplicated hope. Instead, Perez offers presence, witness, and a commitment to telling the truth in forms beautiful enough to sustain attention. The daughter poems are not sentimental, but they are deeply loving, and the combination is harder to achieve than it sounds.

Environmental grief runs through the collection as a sustained frequency rather than a series of dramatic peaks. Perez does not catastrophize; he documents. The coral bleaching data, the rising sea levels, the specific biological losses of Pacific ecosystems: all of this arrives in a tone that is more sad than outraged, more elegiac than polemical. The effect is more disturbing than anger would be. Perez grieves for what is being lost with the precision of someone who has memorized every detail of the thing before it disappears.

Style and Voice

Perez’s voice is one of the most distinctive in contemporary American poetry, and [guma’] shows it at full maturity. He has developed a register that holds multiple tones simultaneously: scholarly and intimate, mournful and celebratory, formally experimental and emotionally direct. He can move within a single poem from the language of legal documents to the language of a bedtime song, and the seams do not show because the transitions are earned by the emotional logic of the work.

There is also, throughout this collection, a quality that is easy to overlook because it is so consistently present: generosity. Perez writes as if the reader is already with him, already capable of holding complexity, already willing to sit with ambiguity. He does not explain his politics or his grief; he enacts them. He trusts the poem to do its work. That trust is itself a kind of argument against the colonial impulse to over-explain and over-determine, and it makes for poetry that gives the reader genuine agency.

The series as a whole has become one of the essential ongoing projects in American poetry, and [guma’] deepens that case. It is a book that knows where it comes from and knows what it is asking of you, and it asks with both urgency and grace.

Verdict

From Unincorporated Territory [guma’] is a collection that earns its difficulty and rewards every return visit. Craig Santos Perez has built something rare: a serial poem that grows more expansive and more necessary with each volume, a work in which the personal and the political are not separate categories but the same category examined from different angles. This is essential reading not only for those interested in Pacific literature or ecopoetics or decolonial poetics, but for anyone who wants to understand what contemporary American poetry is capable of at its most ambitious and most humane. The rating of 4.7 reflects a collection that falls just short of the very highest tier only because its rewards require some familiarity with the earlier volumes; readers coming to Perez fresh may want to start at the beginning of the series. Those who do will find themselves in the company of one of the most important poets writing in English today.

Frequently Asked Questions about From Unincorporated Territory [guma’]

What does “guma'” mean in Chamoru?

“Guma'” is the Chamoru word for home or house. In the context of Craig Santos Perez’s collection, it carries multiple layers of meaning: the physical home left behind in Guam, the concept of belonging that colonialism has disrupted, and the new home being built for his daughter. The glottal stop at the end (the apostrophe in “guma'”) is a feature of Chamoru phonology that marks the word as distinctly not English, a small typographic reminder of linguistic difference on every page.

Do I need to read the earlier volumes in the series first?

You can read [guma’] as a standalone collection, and many readers do. However, the series builds on itself in meaningful ways. Recurring images, phrases, and formal gestures accumulate significance across the four volumes, and readers familiar with the earlier work will find additional layers of meaning. If you want to start from the beginning, the series opens with from Unincorporated Territory [hacha] (2008). That said, [guma’] is welcoming enough to new readers that it serves as a strong entry point.

What is the significance of the word “from” in the series title?

The “from” in the title is a formal and political statement. It signals that these poems are always partial, always excerpted from something larger, always incomplete. This enacts what colonial history does to Indigenous cultures: it fragments and interrupts. The “from” also positions the poet as someone writing away from Guam while still being defined by it. It is one of those single-word choices that opens rather than closes meaning.

How does Perez incorporate Chamoru language into the poems?

Chamoru words and phrases appear throughout the collection, sometimes with translation in the text, sometimes in a glossary at the back, and sometimes without any translation at all. The untranslated moments are intentional: they mark the limits of what can cross linguistic borders and perform, at the level of the reading experience, something of what it feels like to encounter a culture that does not fully translate. The presence of Chamoru is also an act of linguistic recovery, since the language was actively suppressed under both Spanish and American colonial rule.

What environmental issues does the collection address?

Perez engages with a range of environmental concerns specific to the Pacific: coral bleaching, ocean acidification, rising sea levels, and the loss of species dependent on reef ecosystems. He draws on scientific data from sources like NOAA and weaves that data into lyric contexts. The collection does not treat climate change as an abstract global problem but as a specific threat to specific places and specific peoples, particularly Indigenous Pacific communities whose cultures and livelihoods depend on healthy ocean ecosystems.

How does fatherhood shape this collection?

The birth of Perez’s daughter is the emotional center of [guma’]. Her presence transforms the collection’s political concerns into something more intimate and more urgent. The poems about and to his daughter carry the particular anxiety of a parent who understands both colonial history and environmental futures well enough to know that simple hope would be dishonest. What he offers instead is witness, presence, and a commitment to beauty as a form of truth-telling. These poems are among the most emotionally direct in the series.

What formal techniques define Perez’s style?

Perez uses several signature formal techniques: the recursive “from” structure that marks incompleteness; brackets that enclose and protect language under pressure; collage-like juxtapositions of official documents with personal lyric; fragmented lineation with significant white space; and the strategic deployment of Chamoru alongside English. He is also skilled with the long poem and the sequence, building meaning through accumulation and repetition across a collection’s length rather than relying on individual poems to carry full weight alone.

Where does this collection fit in the broader context of Pacific literature?

Perez is one of the central figures in a growing body of Pacific Islander literature written in English, a body of work that includes poets like Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner (Marshall Islands), Teresia Teaiwa (Fiji/Kiribati), and Albert Wendt (Samoa). His work is particularly important for its sustained engagement with Guam specifically, a place that receives very little literary attention despite its complex political status. The from Unincorporated Territory series has helped put Chamoru literature on the map for readers of contemporary American poetry, and Perez’s academic work as a professor at the University of Hawai’i has extended that reach into classrooms across the country.