Proof of Stake

Focusing on immigration, colonialism, and the death of the speaker's infant daughter, Proof of Stake: An Elegy, Charles Valle's debut collection, details how "[t]here is an emotional debt accrued/ In grief, compounded daily by wordless songs." "It's 2019 and there's a man who wants me/ to go back to where I came from...There's a man who wants to/Teach me a lesson on supremacy/There are people who want me to believe in one history." According to Valle the only solution to this, then, is to refuse and resist-- poetically, culturally, politically, every which way.