Gravity Prevails poems by Kamala Platt

Deeply aware of the centuries-old history, geography, and culture of the land spanning Texas and Mexico, Kamala Platt offers in Gravity Prevails the richness of re-memories of this living, breathing colonized geography that continues to nurture its inhabitants, human, animal, and flora. In rich lyricism, sonorous with Spanish, Indian and English languages, the poet hears men and women from the past, echoed by seedlings calling the names of the living and the departed. We are woken up to recognize the plants and the birds that make our lives beautiful but whose lives have become more and more precarious in our “civilization” with its “man-generated climate change.” Will nature continue to prevail? Egrets return even when they are displaced, but some plants are unable to return when we destroy the soil. Kamala feels with the earth. She writes, “Gardeners work with the soil….a living ecosystem,” cognizant of the body’s dance with the earth, listening to its heartbeat and learning from it how to live. Kamala’s “Gravity Prevails” is an urgent plea to us to pay attention to our injustice toward indigenous and marginalized people, to the planet itself, and, therefore, live life protecting Earth mother, Pachamama, who protects us. This volume is essential reading for anyone with a conscience.

― Pramila Venkateswaran, poet laureate of Suffolk County, NY, and author of The Singer of Alleppey (Shanti Arts, 2018)

The poems in Gravity Prevails are both soothing and explosive as the poet searches for harmony and common ground.  While consistently critical of the violence men have wrought against life, Platt is also sensitive to the beauty and power found in the diversity of differences. These poems pay homage to the intimacy of neighbors and the struggle for peace, justice and community endurance. Intent on writing wrongs, this collection serves as a healing balm. Expressing a fierce urgency, these paeans are also prayers, chants, curses, and rebellious gritos thrown, at times, in rage, but always infused with love.

 ― Dr. Louis Mendoza, Director School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies at Arizona State University

Kamala Platt's important new book of poems, GRAVITY PREVAILS, brings together her activism, her commitment to environmental justice and indigenous rights, her life in Kansas and San Antonio, travels, work, local flora, homage to social justice leaders, artists and neighbors. She has an ear and an eye for pain and rights violated, but marks that suffering with grace, humor, dignity, and deep reflection. She offers a multi-lingual, richly textured dance, dedication that reaches our  hearts and feet: "In Kansas there is a Mennonite joke/that says we forbid sex because it might lead to dancing/And yes, dancing is that basic—
as the First Peoples tell it: Dance is the heartbeat of Nuestra Madre/
red mud trembling, universal frenzy made fuerza unida."

 ― Cheryl J. Fish, author of CRATER & TOWER, and THE SAUNA IS FULL OF MAIDS

 Kamala wanders like a migrant from state to state, from region to region, from culture to culture, from issue to issue, electrifying us with what she sees and feels and thinks.    She weaves her words in her poems so that each poem stands alone in its reckonings.  Her poem, beginning with the words "Shovel It", goes to my heart because it identifies where we should go, where we should be in terms of the environment because this is what she and many of us stand for and she puts her words together so eloquently, so basically.  We can identify.  And then she lives by her words.  

― Rebecca Flores, friend and fellow traveler

 The world is too much with us, and too often, we cannot see beyond it. For Mexicans in Texas, the world has always been such, but we have resisted con ganas, lessons imparted in these beautiful writings by Kamala Platt. Like some Dorothy from Kansas, she came as a woman to craft her message of hope and struggle in Texas. There is even a Toto, named Chato, that her San Antonio Westside neighborhood loves and protects because he “spread goodwill to all.” Love and goodwill but also passionate struggle are what Kamala offers in this work even as her love reaches back to her ancestral Kansas and her parents and beyond in her “letter to the world.”  Back on the Westside, conjunto music disappears, but she and her neighbors share berries and flowers, “no charge.” Here gravity will not prevail.  Kamala lifts us to see the world as it might be.

― José E. Limón, Mody C. Boatright Regents Professor of American Literature University of Texas at Austin (Emeritus)