Pigafetta Is My Wife
Pigafetta Is My Wife enters the crisis that is the love between the colonizer and the colonized. These poems fragment the journals of Antonio Pigafetta, a 16th Century traveler who recorded Magellan’s hellish circumnavigation of the globe, while tracking a present-day speaker and his beloved as they are distanced and reunited across the map. Along the way we visit historical moments including a botched circumcision as performance art, the Rape of Nanking, and 17th century missionaries in the Philippines. Through this intertwining of narratives the book reveals how the past and present are visceral beasts caught in a cycle of passion and destruction. Like an epic murder ballad, Hall moves from collage to epistle, suffering to ecstasy, while pinpointing what is at stake in the pursuit of love and the dismantling of the self.
Joe Hall is the author of The Devotional Poems and Pigafetta Is My Wife. With Chad Hardy, he wrote The Container Store Vols. I & II (SpringGun 2012). His poems, fiction, book reviews, and essays have appeared in Gulf Coast, HTMLGiant, Zone 3, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. He is currently studying Poetics at SUNY Buffalo.