Dream of Xibalba, Stephanie Adams-Santos‘s incantatory long poem, draws the reader into a dreamworld where the barrier between life and death grows porous, populated by ancestors and spirits. From major new storytelling talent Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare is a blazing, bodily, raucous journey through contemporary Hawaiian identity and womanhood. Moderated by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya (Helen House).

Dream of Xibalba, Stephanie Adams-Santos’s incantatory long poem, draws the reader into a dreamworld where the barrier between life and death grows porous, populated by ancestors and spirits. The influence of such poets as Cecilia Vicuña, Federico García Lorca, and Yvan Goll is evident here, yet Adams-Santos’s voice and vision are entirely her own. Dream of Xibalba is a unique, epic work of cultural and spiritual significance.

“Dream of Xibalba is a long and hypnotic meditation on rediscovery. Each page spirals out from the page before in a manner of breathless recognition: ‘You open yourself / your mouth your eyes your forehead / with a sharp stone carried from childhood.’ This is not a poetry of fearlessness but of the journey one takes in spite of fear. ‘This is what you must listen for.'” —Jericho Brown, judge of The 2021 Orison Poetry Prize

“Dream of Xibalba […] is an epic poem that tests the boundaries of life and death, reality and the dream world, ancestors and spirits and ghosts.”
—HipLatina

Megan Kamalei Kakimoto’s wrenching and sensational debut story collection follows a cast of mixed native Hawaiian and Japanese women through a contemporary landscape thick with inherited wisdom and the ghosts of colonization. This is a Hawai’i where unruly sexuality and generational memory overflow the postcard image of paradise and the boundaries of the real, where the superstitions born of the islands take on the weight of truth. A childhood encounter with a wild pua’a (pig) on the haunted Pali highway portends one young woman’s fraught relationship with her pregnant body. An elderly widow begins seeing her deceased lover in a giant flower. A kanaka writer, mid-manuscript, feels her raw pages quaking and knocking in the briefcase. Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare is both a fierce love letter to Hawaiian identity and mythology, and a searing dispatch from an occupied territory threatening to erupt with violent secrets.

“All things weird, wonderful, mysterious, and mythical collide in this excellent debut story collection. Focused on mixed native Hawaiian and Japanese women and ensconced in Hawaiian history and lore, each story explores what it means to be a woman, but especially a woman of color . . . This great book signals the arrival of a very talented writer.” —Booklist, starred review

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