Mele, by Kalehua Kim, embodies the meaning of the word “mele” – a Hawaiian song or chant traditionally used to preserve history through the oral tradition. Winner of the Trio House Press Editor’s Choice Prize, Kim’s debut collection evokes modes of language and culture that shape the contours of memory and expose the fault lines of family and self, as well as the grace and generosity of healing, acknowledgement, and commemoration. The poems reflect on what we inherit and how who we become is intertwined with who our parents were and are, and the pain of facing that reality: “One day your voice will become mine,Ka leo o maua/Though I am not prepared for your end…”  With this mele, Kim honors the memory of a lost mother, as well as the struggles of a daughter as she becomes a wife and mother herself, while honoring her roots and forging a new path.

To read Kalehua Kim's Mele is to sing through the mossy tendrils of grief - each poem a lush, shell-echoed invocation. Full of visceral language, lyrical rhythm, and expansive form, these poems are layered with matrilineal love, dreamscapes, familial sonnets, contrapuntals, generational choruses, elegies, and tender interiority. Reading Mele is like pressing a plump poem to your face: "I roll the mango over my face we are cheek to cheek my mother and me oh, the ripeness of memory." Speaking across earthly and ancestral worlds, Kim's poems feel like offerings, replete with chickens and yams and radiating care. This is an evocative collection I will be returning to often, opening up each valve of my heart like " slices of sea cucumber strewn on the ocean floor,/ waiting to multiply."

- Jane Wong, author of How to Not be Afraid of Everything and Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City

Kalehua Kim

Softcover, 100 pp.