is(ness) book orders from Gnashing Teeth Publishing.
is(ness) Amazon
is(ness) Barnes & Noble
is(ness) West Side Books, Denver
Praise for is(ness):
“Every time I have heard Crisosto Apache read their poems, I have been moved by grace, intelligence, and vulnerability. This new collection confirms my impression of ambition to dwell with the best poetry has to offer us, from celebration to provocation to remembrance. Lines in “San Francisco, California, 1962” about the “brave young soul” that lives beyond old age stay with me. In “Snow Falling In C Minor,” the poet’s name and history become a traveling music, a heritage. I am moved, too by these late lines about light:
the weight of reflection reminds the eyes to seek
what is behind the mind so that a spark can be lit
a dawn for what can be expected in a yucca basket
or buckskin pouch summoning the blessings
and gazing through all awaiting pollen of bodies
Poem by poem, is(ness) builds a vivid poetic atlas. It is a powerful, sometimes harrowing, and always beautiful book.”
— David Mason, author of Ludlow and other books
“In is(ness), Apache’s words are born in the moment, inviting us to be (t)here too, communing with place, with being, and with memory. In lines like “…yesterday’s light/is not yesterday” we are reminded that time is not as linear as Western thinking would lead us to believe. In this expansive time, Apache wanders in all directions through the wide-open spaces of their life; what is, what will be, and what was inextricably braided together. is(ness) is an invitation to live a more curious existence, to embrace the “penumbra”: the something between shadow and illumination. This is a collection of deep listening, of a devotional attention. Crisosto points our gaze towards something ever-precious: The Present.”
— brice maiurro, Author of The Heart is an Undertaker Bee and Editor-in-Chief of South Broadway Press
“In their multidimensional third collection, Crisosto Apache invites us into the tender geography of belonging and displacement, where memory migrates and the past lives within the present tense. Our bodies carry stories, these poems insist, revealing how “distance translates / into diffidence of transmigration, and (trans)isolation / moving forward in the transportation of adapting.” In poems that show moments not as definitive points but as convergences that assemble and ripple outward, Apache suggests a profound philosophy in language itself: The present tense of the verb to be — is — expresses the future, past, present, and dream world (imagination) simultaneously. is(ness) arrives at a moment when the world wants to reduce us to data points, insisting instead on the irreducible complexity of human experience — and in doing so, enlivens all of us.”
— Radha Marcum, author of Pine, Soot, Tendon, Bone, founder of Poet to Poet
“Crisosto Apache’s third collection is(ness), invokes a sentience transmitted in dreams, memory, and presence magnified in powerful, layered imagery and polyrhythmic forms skilfully demonstrating the poet’s perception of temporality, belonging, memory, and the crucial determination to de-center or give power to linear and binary thought.”
— Margo Tamez, author of Father | Genocide.
“In his latest poetry collection, Crisosto Apache’s unique, distinctive voice takes the reader on a journey to distant, dreamlike horizons and to the innermost depths of one’s interior. (is)ness is a well-crafted instrument that displays Apache’s profound emotional and poetic intelligence.
The frame that forms is(ness) is drawn from Apache’s Diné and Apache heritage, but it’s not pinned down nor penned in by it. Apache searches the balconies of Estes Park, the bridges of San Francisco, the avenues of Farmington and the mesa tops of Santa Cruz Valley for chips and flakes of cosmic beauty, polishes them and holds them cupped reverently in his givers hands and invites the world to take them, hold them up and examine them in the sun.
In is(ness), Apache’s poems stir the soul like an honeeshgish stirs the ceremonial fire.”
— Steven Wesley Law, author of Gone (Middle Creek Publishing).
GHOSTWORD, book orders.
Winner of the Publishing Triangle, 2023 Betty Berzon Emerging Writer’s Award.
Finalist of the Colorado Authors League (CAL) 2023 poetry book award.
Praises for Ghostword:
Crisosto Apache draws powerfully on his Mescalero Apache language and culture and, guided along the way by touchstone sparks from the Japanese writer Akutagawa Ryunosuke, creates a singular journey out of “emotional burial and systemic abuse.” Where Akutagawa encounters erasure, “Gazing up at them everything was forgotten,” in Crisosto Apache’s hands, everything is remembered and confronted, and, though filled with ash, these poems are testament to struggle, survival, and, x, the mysterious light of existence. -- Arthur Sze author of The Glass Constellation
A powerful personal journey of reflection and response. In lyric vignettes inspired by Akutagawa Ryonosuke’s A Fool’s Life, Crisosto Apache creates an original portrait of a mythic and myth-making protagonist confronting the memories, language, and figures that haunt and inhabit his Ghostword – a stunning collection. -- Chip Livingston author of Crow-Blue, Crow-Black, and Museum of False Starts
Ghostword is poetry for people who aren’t afraid of their own shadows. History is inescapable, but how we allow history to contextualize our present is totally up to us. Crisosto will continue to exist and resist until he has passed on to what follows this life. -- Jason Arment author of Musalaheen: A War Memoir
This poetry collection is a solid leap in the maturity of voice and creative purpose from Crisosto’s debut collection GENESIS (Lost Alphabet) which is saying volumes because Crisosto’s first book is masterful, Ghostword is an excellent follow. -- Matt Hohner, author of Thresholds and Other Poems
Crisosto Apache's new book Ghostword weaves the immediate senses, memory, lineage, history, literary study, and the experience of being and becoming. At times these feel like separate moments, even as we realize the inherent connection of everything touched and experienced. Ghostword is a mirror, as much as the work a study of Ryunosuke Akutagawa's A Fool’s Life. The study provides a vastness within the practice of a constraint and ends in a decided clarity on identity and its juxtaposition against the world. – Meca'Ayo author of an identity polyptych
GENESIS Book is out of print, 2026.
GENESIS (Lost Alphabet)
Praises
“[G]estation to birth of new generation, this book gives monumental range to the genesis of identity and charts the pathway to soul of self. A long-awaited phenomenal debut.” —Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
“Entirely new, experimental, and worth the effort of reading. Passionate in places, contemplative in others, he travels from that ancient past toward the distant universe.”—Linda Hogan
“These poems record not only the nine months of history occurring while the poet formed in gestation... it attempts to make sense of the whirling world of chromosomes, of snow across body-laden battlefields, the whirl of strobe lights in a sex club, and the spiral which meets in the center where isdzán and haastiń (woman and man) become indistinguishable. Apache’s collection challenges our footing on things we thought we knew.”—James Thomas Stevens
“With the use of Apache Language (Ndé Bizaa) & Navajo Language (Diné Bizaad) Apache creates a cascading resonance where the reader is asked to separate themselves from what they know of Native American history, and consider the Indigenous experience in America through Apache’s experience on the reservation and in urban settings. Through those locations we are exposed to meditations on sexualities, Native American identity, and historical trauma…GENESIS delivers an experience that I both kinetic and visceral.” — Santee Frazier