“Every time I have heard Crisosto Apache read their poems, I have been moved by grace, intelligence, and vulnerability. This new collection confirms my impression of ambition to dwell with the best poetry has to offer us, from celebration to provocation to remembrance. Lines in “San Francisco, California, 1962” about the “brave young soul” that lives beyond old age stay with me. In “Snow Falling In C Minor,” the poet’s name and history become a traveling music, a heritage. I am moved, too by these late lines about light:
the weight of reflection reminds the eyes to seek
what is behind the mind so that a spark can be lit

a dawn for what can be expected in a yucca basket
or buckskin pouch summoning the blessings
and gazing through all awaiting pollen of bodies

Poem by poem, is(ness) builds a vivid poetic atlas. It is a powerful, sometimes harrowing, and always beautiful book.”

—David Mason, author of Ludlow and other books

“In their multidimensional third collection, Crisosto Apache invites us into the tender geography of belonging and displacement, where memory migrates and the past lives within the present tense. Our bodies carry stories, these poems insist, revealing how “distance translates / into diffidence of transmigration, and (trans)isolation / moving forward in the transportation of adapting.” In poems that show moments not as definitive points but as convergences that assemble and ripple outward, Apache suggests a profound philosophy in language itself: The present tense of the verb to be — is — expresses the future, past, present, and dream world (imagination) simultaneously. is(ness) arrives at a moment when the world wants to reduce us to data points, insisting instead on the irreducible complexity of human experience — and in doing so, enlivens all of us.”
–Radha Marcum, author of Pine, Soot, Tendon, Bone, founder of Poet to Poet