from unincorporated territory [åmot]

from unincorporated territory [åmot] is a poetry collection by Craig Santos Perez and the fifth book in his ongoing from unincorporated territory series about Guam, or Guåhan, the island in the western Pacific that is home to the Indigenous Chamoru people. Åmot is the Chamoru word for medicine, especially the medicinal plants that traditional healers gathered and used alongside chants calling on ancestral spirits. Perez treats storytelling itself as a form of healing medicine as he writes about colonialism, militarism, migration, environmental injustice and the loss of elders. Mixing experimental and visual forms with passages in Chamoru, the poems move between the island and its diaspora while honoring family and Indigenous knowledge. The collection won the 2023 National Book Award for Poetry.