The soneta was born to hold what couldn’t be held. Now it holds up a mirror to empire and says: Look. See yourself. See what you’ve become. See what you’ve always been.

When I created the soneta—a six-line poem with ten words per line and rhyme scheme of poet choice—I thought I was simply solving a formal problem. How could poetry hold the compressed intensity of our moment? How could it be both accessible and profound, both musical and urgent? But as I wrote my first work, Poeta: Sonetas and Sonnets, the form began teaching me what it was for.

The soneta’s constraints—the brevity and lyricism—force a clarity that academic poetry often avoids. No hiding behind obscure references or flowery abstractions. Every word must earn its place. This isn’t poetry for poetry professors. It’s poetry for the mother in Gaza, the teenager in Chicago, the worker in Lagos.

When I write ‘GenocideJoe,’ everyone knows who I mean. When I count ‘Two hundred forty-six years,’ every Black American feels that weight. The language is direct because the crimes are direct. The form is accessible because justice must be.

I wrote MANIFEST DESTINY believing that the grandmother who never finished high school and the PhD student should both be able to read these poems and feel the truth. Poetry that requires a decoder ring is poetry that has already failed its political mission.

It started with Gaza. In 2023, as I was crafting Poeta, the bombs were already falling. Children were already being pulled from rubble. The opening movement, “Monsoon,” floods the reader with truth:

“Don’t wake them up, the children are sleeping
Covered in debris, from the bombing of the camp…”

As I wrote, I began to see patterns. The language used to justify violence in Gaza—”human shields,” “collateral damage,” “mowing the lawn”—echoed somewhere deep in American memory. The forced displacement, the dehumanization, the claim of divine right to land—where had I heard this before?

Then it struck me: Manifest Destiny. That 19th-century American doctrine that dressed genocide in the clothes of divine providence. The same playbook, different actors. The “savage Indians” became “terrorist Palestinians.” The covered wagons became armored bulldozers. The city on a hill became settlements on Palestinian hills.

This recognition demanded an additional collection, a continuation of my life’s work. If “Poeta” introduced the soneta as a form capable of holding both beauty and horror, MANIFEST DESTINY would use that form to expose how colonial violence repeats across centuries and continents.

In the new work, I make these connections explicit. Soneta 288 declares:

“I’m the American man, and woman, on the wild plains
Of the Wild West, taming the tribes of the wilderness,

 Claiming their land for our destiny, commanded by the Creator.
I’m the American man, and woman, on the scorched plains
Of the West Bank, crusading in the name of holiness.
But don’t call me a Usurper. Call me a Settler.”

This isn’t metaphor. This is repetition.

I’ll admit—making these connections felt dangerous. Who was I to draw parallels between American expansion and Israeli settlements? Would readers think I was minimizing one genocide by comparing it to another? But the patterns were too clear to ignore, the repetitions too exact. Sometimes the poet’s job is to say what others see but won’t name.

And with the almost cultic status Israel enjoys with American presidents for decades now, I knew what I was risking. The censure. The doxxing. The banning. The accusations of antisemitism for criticizing a state’s policies. Artists have lost venues, publishers, professorships for far less. But how could I see “city on a hill” become settlements on Palestinian hills and stay silent? How could I see the pattern and not name it?

The title MANIFEST DESTINY reclaims and subverts a term used to justify American expansion. Just as the original doctrine claimed divine sanction for displacing Native Americans and Mexicans, today we see similar claims made about Palestinian land. The same songs, different singers.

But why should this matter? Because understanding these patterns is essential to breaking them. When we see how the playbook repeats—the dehumanization, the claims of civilizational superiority, the erasure of indigenous presence—we can better resist it.

The soneta form itself becomes an act of resistance. Its constraints force precision, its musicality demands we listen, its brevity makes it shareable, memorable, chantable. In an age of information overload, the soneta cuts through. You can’t ignore six lines when your body already processed its truth before your brain had the chance to rationalize it away.

What began in “Poeta” as formal experimentation has become in MANIFEST DESTINY a tool for revolutionary witness. The personal love poems remain—because we must assert what we’re fighting for, not just against. But they exist alongside unflinching examination of power: “GenocideJoe” (Soneta 306); “6% Sconnies = 42% bodies living up the river” (Soneta 370) (Black residents comprise only 6% of Wisconsin’s population but 42% of its prison population); “Two hundred forty-six years” of slavery (Soneta 279).

These aren’t abstractions. These are receipts.

Some will say poetry changes nothing. But poetry changes how we see, and how we see changes how we act. When we recognize that Gaza 2025 and Wounded Knee 1890 are chapters in the same book, when we see that “Never Again” has become “Again and Again,” we can no longer claim ignorance.

What emerged is less poetic work than a movable tribunal: history is summoned, scripture cross-examined, language itself put under oath. The work comes armed with extensive endnotes—not academic posturing but evidence for the prosecution. Every claim is documented, every pattern footnoted. MANIFEST DESTINY widens the ancient sonnet’s aperture until global geopolitics, Yoruba childhood, American racial trauma, and Palestinian suffering all fit inside six lines. Where some works whisper to be parsed, this one shouts—but the shout is orchestrated, intentional and not reckless.

The work succeeds through audacity—the compression of six lines, the sweep of centuries, the braiding of multiple linguistic traditions. Where it bruises the reader, the bruising feels essential to its project: to leave no illusion of innocence intact.

This is the work of poetry in our time—not to comfort, but to witness. Not to escape, but to transform the lyric into a public square where truth can be spoken and power held accountable.

As I write this, bombs are still falling. Children are still being pulled from rubble. But somewhere, someone is reading these sonetas and seeing the patterns. Someone is making connections. Someone is discovering that their private pain connects to public injustice.

The powerful have always used language to disguise violence. Now we use language as both prophetic scroll and legal brief, as love letter and indictment. We write to ensure that this time, we see what’s happening. This time, we name it. This time, no one walks away with their innocence intact.

That’s what MANIFEST DESTINY demands—not just witness, but reckoning. Not just poetry, but transformation.

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