Fossils On A Red Flag by Amelia Díaz Ettinger

Fossils on a Red Flag by Amelia Díaz Ettinger is a powerful collection of poems that interrogates the (mis)use as a gunnery and bombing practice site by the U.S. military of Puerto Rico’s Isla Culebra. This work grapples with what is lost in the language of official government orders and, by doing so, sheds light on the human and environmental costs. With sharp turns of lyricism and image shaped by the insistent voice of witness, this collection honors the history of los Culebrenses who have spent generations gathering “baskets of loss / —[and who] still gather after so many hurricanes.” Like the queen conch, present in a series of these poems and whose shell is a symbol of survival and beauty, Fossils on a Red Flag presents a vision of perseverance.

–José Angel Araguz, author of An Empty Pot’s Darkness

Between half-lives and a single, profound swarm, Ettinger speaks in a voice filled with sorrow, longing, and pride.  The poems in this compact collection hammer and pound against the resilient people who have long been America’s forgotten kinsmen, while recalling a state of innocence during a time of conflict. In our time of conflict, these poems are vital signals, urging us to live in grace.

–James Benton, author of Sailor

Right away, I was struck by the beauty of the poems in Amelia Ettinger‘s Fossils on a Red Flag, as well as their necessity. These poems of witness tell the mostly unknown history of the island of Culebra in Puerto Rico–its colonization and use for many years as a weapons training ground by the U.S. Navy. Yet Ettinger’s poems also embody the rich natural history of this misused land, with its conch shells and turtlegrass, proving as this book attests over and over: “Even in the thunder of explosives/ there was time for love.”

–James Crews, author of Bluebird and Every Waking Moment