Myths from Which We Got Our Name

The poems in Myths from Which We Got Our Name are mapped in the stars. They call and sing to ancestors, they build a world for those named and left wanting. Here, signs and science converge in equal measure, like fear and longing, love and inheritance. "How mysterious, the science of the body," in Tala's hands, the world is a bramble of myth and miracles. Is it the world we build or the world we're born into that guides us? Each poem here reminds us to hold fast to what's been lost and hold dear the hope of what may come.

-Remica Bingham-Risher, author of What We Ask of Flesh and Starlight & Error

"How much of my history was lost before it made its way to me?" asks Courtney Tala in her stunning debut, Myths From Which We Got Our Name. Tala, whose last name translates to star in Tagalog, traces the arc of what a name can mean from its ancient origins, to the gravity it holds now, to the evolution of what it might become. A family name is a complicated history of hurt and love-be it through threads of myths or the twisting of chromosomes and DNA. Tala skillfully bows between the lyric and sterile to weave the stories that stretch across those in her family, both her given one and her chosen one. In Myths From Which We Got Our Name, Tala marches bravely into the wounds that shape us, that name us. "And maybe this too is love," she writes, "to offer up small morsels in the hopes / that joy will spread across a beloved's face." Take these morsels with all the love Tala has offered; these poems hold hope in them all.

-Nishat Ahmed, author of Field Guide for End Days and Brown Boy

There's a Zen teaching riddle that asks, "What was your original face before you were born?" In Courtney Tala's poems, the answer is: the face of a goddess among the stars, or the face of a child we are ready to welcome and name even before it is born. It is the face of "preemptive grief," lineages of impossible love as well as the ghosts of all our kin. These poems take you beyond the merely measurable and predictable to the reassurances that can only be offered through poems. And we need such poems more than ever, in these times.

-Luisa A. Igloria, 20th Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia

Published in a year of heartache, here in Courtney Tala's Myths from Which We Got Our Name is a resounding chaplet that reckons through storm, famine, and flood. Truly in these pages, between myth and history, between the biologies of Punnets and the lineage of what is elegiac, Tala breaks the reader again and again. Every time I return to this manuscript I am struck by its glory and necessity. Just like its mythopoetic origins steeped in folktale, in light years and constellations, in descendants of the stars, the reader voyages to reclaim humanity's infinite song and its never-ceasing pattern: intimate histories "falling from our bodies like grace as we go." It is a singular work that yearns and sustains, rescues and survives, and-most of all-when we read these poems, we remember.

-Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley, author of Dēmos