Disaster Tourism

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Disaster Tourism is a debut poetry collection that offers glimpses of disasters at once personal and global. The term “disaster tourism” refers to the offensive practice of visiting sites after a cataclysm. Steeped in violence, injustice, immigration stories, and accounts of police brutality, Disaster Tourism gives us a lens to re-imagine our dangerous surroundings in the hopes that we strive toward a better existence, even when it hurts.

Born of a Cuban refugee father and a mother whose homeland of Gotteschee is now considered Slovenia, Rena J. Mosteirin’s identity and poetry are shaped by the respective lost homelands of her parents. Bold, unflinching, and lyrical, yet laced with a disarmingly clever and sometimes wicked sense of humor, these poems sift through various sites and forms of devastation to reveal moments of love and joy.

Mosteirin uses observational wit and arresting clarity to bring us closer to the fires burning all around us. Yet, through it all, there is the interconnectedness of family and community – including our world community – entreating us to carry on with an eye toward helping each other through this challenging life. Ultimately, Disaster Tourism holds a mirror to our broken world and asks: what will you do when you find yourself looking back?

Excerpt from "Let Light Come from the Border"

Let the borderlight shine you up the mountain
fierce and sweet, rivers and tall trees.
Let the moon stay on the other side of the ice until morning.
Turn down the eyes of the lamp or we will not shine.
Muddy water rounds the curve of the new day.
Let me show you how to stand in the light.

Let the sun suffer a thin green light through the ice.
Let ice chunks stick together to form a large, unstable boat.
Let me show you how to stand in the iceboat without tipping over
as the snow melts down, guided by the moon,
going to the ocean, from where the forest grazes
to where the great white feeds.
Wait for your light. Wait for your light.

Praise for Disaster Tourism

“Disaster Tourism is a work of riotous, rigorous fathoming. Sensuous, renunciatory. Needfully disorienting. So we go careening into the quiet shocks of Mosteirin’s strange and crystal vision, death riven and yet alive with the urgency of its saying.” —aracelis girmay, author of the black maria

“Disaster Tourism tallies the horrors and consequences of a darkening millennium as if through a tourist’s camera, gobbling greedily whatever there is. The snapshots are also the slideshow, a hauntingly eager trip through a nation increasingly determined to dehumanize women, celebrate violence, and careen off an oncoming cliff. Of any stranger, one can say, at best, ‘I was wrong to fear them but not wrong to fear.’ How to live with it all? How to go on? Disaster Tourism also demonstrates an unyielding love for the world and for other people, even if ‘Love costs too much.’” —Craig Morgan Teicher, author of Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey

“In Rena Mosteirin’s Disaster Tourism, the poet undergoes a process of self-examination as she sees and re-sees the self from myriad perspectives and angles. This is a book for our times, noting as it does the varieties of brutality, but also the ways in which we learn to carry on despite the injustices we and others must endure. The poet finds herself in different cities, different places and houses, and in each location, the poet renders experience into meaning by deploying her great lyrical gifts. This is a collection full of surprises brought on by a tough mind, and an open, indelible heart.” —Mark Wunderlich, author of God of Nothingness

“The poems in Disaster Tourism all share proximity to the ocean that 'breathes itself back into you,' whether literal or the metaphorical fathoms of grief, disenfranchisement and reinvent elegy. Rena J. Mosteirin is tender for us, turns her 'eye hurt by too much love' to beloveds and ancestors in a collection with keen humor and generosity.” —Carmen Gimenez, author of Be Recorder