IIThis cloud of souls has wandered all over the sky,gone to the corner store and may never come backI have dreamed of your face for three nights and each timeit rises, it redefines itselfYou warn of general dangers and rise quickly to leaveiced over fears, born of an iron ship torn in halfand the silhouette in aggregate placed in a tiny doorway,his expression a touch bewilderedThe city is run by enterprising zombies and occasional artistsI choose to sit in the center of an empty white room as a half dead flowerThe net of dream and interdependence gets torn throughout the night—haphazard curses begin to fly (one thousand years of infamy)What good is all of this when I am left for dead and looking on?
Dreaming of Li Po
Cedar Sigo
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Dreaming of Li Po from Siren of Atlantis.
Copyright 2025 by Cedar Sigo.
Reprinted with permission of the author and Wave Books.
Cedar Sigo is a poet and member of the Suquamish Nation. He studied at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute. He is the author of endless books and pamphlets of poetry, including All This Time (Wave Books, 2021), Stranger in Town (City Lights, 2010), Expensive Magic (House Press, 2008), two editions of Selected Writings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003 and 2005), and most recently Siren of Atlantis (Wave Books, 2025). In 2022 he received a grants to artist’s award from The Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He has taught all over the country, including The University of Washington, Bard College, Washington University, Naropa University, and The Institute of American Indian Arts. He lives in Lofall, Washington.
Cedar Sigo's latest poetry collection, Siren of Atlantis, is an introspective odyssey of remarkable poetic and personal resonance.
Here are poems that speak to Sigo's profound experience of learning to write again after suffering a stroke in 2022. In creating this work, the author retraces poetic sources and reexamines style and tone, using a variety of compositional techniques to renegotiate what is at stake in the work. There is a joy in this collection, as Sigo allows us to bear witness to the rediscovery of language, imparting the work with a new and dramatic clarity, for the poet and ultimately for the reader as well.
"The poems in Cedar Sigo’s newest book, Siren of Atlantis (Wave Books, 2025), arrive like a ferry crossing in stormlight—rhythmic, flickering, full of veiled terrain. To leave land behind, even briefly, is a momentous act if you’re in the right mindset. Cedar’s poems show he’s always in that mindset—the one attuned to passage, to pattern, to poetic weather."
—Simon Wolf, Poetry Northwest
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