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.