Catastrophic Molting
Author: Amy Shimshon-Santo
Publisher: Flowersong Press
Cover Art: Miyo Stevens-Gandara
ISBN-13: 9781953447272
Publication date: 08/22/2022
Reviews & Blessings
“Catastrophic Molting, is a brilliant, impassioned, and urgent collection.” Literary Mama, “A Mother’s Resistance Poetry: A Review of Catastrophic Molting,” by Diane Gottlieb.
Catastrophic Molting “captures all the messy dichotomies of a profound, definitive moment on our lifetimes…“Both a prayer and a benediction, blessing the poet and the reader…” - Washington Independent Book Review by Angela Maria Spring.
The Rumpus interview of Amy with Janet Rodriguez.
“Books I’m Excited About,” Lynne Thompson (Poet Laureate of Los Angeles) for the LA Public Library.
CATASTROPHIC MOLTING (FlowerSong Press) Amy Shimshon-Santo uses the tools of language to remind readers there is power in repudiation, comfort in collective mourning, and possibility in reimagining. The book title is inspired by the molting ritual of sea elephants (Mirounga Angustirostris) along the California coast. The mirounga rest together on the shore as social protection from violence when they are the most vulnerable. Only through these periods of dramatic change can they grow sleek new coats. The book’s journey begins with “Contagion,” revealing a world split in half like a calabash by a virus. “Beating, trembling,” a woman pleads for mercy while the poems confront the liminality of profound change. “A new cycle had begun / I would never be the same again.” The second section, Sangue, gives voice to mourning and rage. “when you murder the future of music / you are conjuring extinction.” Dysfunction on planet Earth reverberates from the street into the expansive galaxy. Refusing to normalize violence, the poet gathers war inside her own body to detonate it, then blows “tsunami-wind / to rattle clear the desks.” With the verve of Oya, the goddess of ancestral and radical change, the book claims ground for empathy and inter-being. The collection asks readers to imagine: “what if we were a part of a whole / that loved us without ceasing?” Catastrophic Molting breaks from inertia and seeks new ground. Our “foremothers greet the unborn” and are “betrothed to a story that doesn’t wish us dead.” Shimshon-Santo suggests that “stepping off might actually be, stepping in / turning away might actually be, turning toward.”
Early Praise for Catastrophic Molting
“Catastrophic Molting is a necessary book. These poems thrum with anger (“who can be witness/to these times/and not want to be thunder?”) and glow with compassion. Her poems are awake to both the pain and beauty of our world. At the end of the title poem, she asks “what if we were a part of a whole/that loved us without ceasing?” Being inside this book feels like being part of such a whole, an immersive ocean of unceasing love.”
-Gayle Brandeis
“Amy Shimshon-Santo’s Catastrophic Molting is an exploration of the deeper connections we inhabit. The poems weave the tragedies we experience daily with the beauty and wonderment of being alive, “I began to see/how the world is / all things linked/in the same place.”Among separation and closeness, desperation and hope, she invites us to thrive in the abundance that is all around us.”
-Leonora Simonovis
“Amy Shimshon-Santo is the most organic poet I have ever read. Her art erupts or flows as the subject demands, cherishing and berating the world with equal ferocity; one minute politically exigent, the next dreamy and attuned to the language of the tiniest living thing.”
-Mamle Kabu
Amy is “the kind of poet that breaks the old language and reconstructs the new from shards and visions. Collaboration is at the heart, black ink, a novelist’s words, rose petals, children, such stems and blooms. Grateful for you as we always are when the artist appears just at the nick of time.”
- Deena Metzger
“Mamamia, What a beautiful story and what beautiful works, cara Amy. I send you a poets auguri.”
-Jack Hirschman
“In Catastrophic Molting Amy Shimshon-Santo’s poems of revelation are made in an age of streaming messages, zooming interactions, war, the police state, incarceration, and toxic cities. Her poems are a space to heal our cuerpos with her dazzling butterfly wisdom, and sky warrior rhymes.
-Adrian Ernesto Cepeda