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Poetry
As Michael Lujan Bevacqua says in a review essay for the academic journal Transmotion: "Perez seeks to turn the reader away from those mythical maps of modernity, whereby inclusion and assimilation lead to viability and universality. He seeks to push them in new directions not beset by those limiting politics of recognition." By contrast, Brandy Nālani McDougall in the Routledge Companion to Native American Literature emphasizes Perez's "diasporic experience as a Chamoru."

Perez's poetry is embedded in and makes reference to a historical context, such that his work “enacts alternative political and cultural imaginary for Guam, its people, and the Chamorro language" through a variety of themes, explored through a variety of techniques.

Historical and Political Context
Perez's poetry deals with Guam's current status as an unincorporated territory of the United States, and the presence of the U.S. military. This legal status is a result of several historical events. The first include Ferdinand Magellan making landfall in 1521, and Spanish forces setting up trading operations between regions of South America and various Pacific islands (such as Guam) in subsequent decades. However, after the United States claimed victory in the Spanish-American War in 1898, power over the island was transferred to the U.S. navy administration as one of the winner's "spoils." In the early 1900s, United States Supreme Court therefore deliberated over what is known as the "insular cases." These legal proceedings decided that newly acquired territories like Guam (and Puerto Rice) would be owned and used (for military operations, resources, etc) by the U.S. government, but that the regions themselves would not be given the status of "state" and the people within would not be given the status of "citizen." Perez pays particular attention to this paradoxical arrangement in his poems.

The United States remained in control of the island until global conflicts of World War II led to Japanese forces seizing control in 1941. In 1944, the United States military recaptured Guam. The military has since continued projects on the island, remains on the its largest employers, and has become a largely normalized presence to Chamorros and other residents.

Themes and Techniques
Perez's poetry focuses on the themes of Pacific life, immigration to the US, the colonial history of the Pacific Islands and the various diasporas of Pacific Islanders help to fill a gap in the lack of literature that centers of references Guam as a subject. To this end, his poetry uses a variety of themes, explored with a variety of techniques.

Decoloniality
The poems collectively tell a story of "Guam as a dynamic, Indigenous narrative - one that resists erasure and domination" for the Native people, called Chamorros. He has stated that part of the purpose of this series is to "create counter-mapping to subvert [colonial] maps." His poems deal with a sense of belonging alongside Guam's status of "unincorporation," function as a counter to the different kinds of cultural erasure facing Chamorro people, and generally demonstrate the ability to survive amidst changing political, historical, and social contexts. He also deals with the religious legacy that Spanish colonialism left on the island, incorporating Catholicism into the imagery and sometimes the structure of his poems. Perez suggests an alternative way for thinking about land and time, and his poetry "provides basis for these alternative paths, like echoing sonar, leading us through layers of language and time."

Language
Perez explores the use of different written languages, the effects of legal languages, and the possibilities of new words in his poetry.


 * Written languages: He uses the Chamorro language alongside mostly English (though there is additionally an instance of Japanese counting) in his poetry to remind readers how the culture of the native people has endured, despite both U.S. and Japanese policies to eliminate them.
 * Legal languages: he includes the entire transcript of his testimony in front of the United Nation's Special Political and Decolonialization Committee in crossed-out (strikethrough) text to show readers the legal struggles Chamorro and other Indigenous activists are facing. It has also been argued that his poetry looks at how “the dry language of law and politics can be infiltrated and inflated by the blood and tears of the peoples who are directly affected by some of those laws.”
 * New words: Perez coins terms that help explain his poetry. He uses the word "re-territorialization" to refer the way his poems connect land and words through reader's bodies as a new way to experience poetry, a practice called "embodiment." He also uses the word "preterrain" to suggest new ways to look at things like economic and social vulnerability, loss language and other cultural practices. These terms are explored through techniques like Perez talking about his memories, family, imperialism, and tourism in his poems. Relatedly, he is said to use a "discontiguous neologism" to refer to the way Guam's status as an unincorporated island means it both belongs to the United States of America while paradoxically also not being part of it the way states are.

Visual Cues
Perez employs bracketed Chamorro words, tildes, poems broken up in different sections, poems collaged with other kinds of text (e.g. news excerpts, transcript of Perez's testimony in front of the United Nation's Special Political and Decolonialization Committee), strikethrough text, and faded (gray) text to help convey some of these themes.

Fragmentary Quality
Perez writes with a fragmentary quality that resists traditional expectations of how a poem or work of poetry should unfold. The use of the preposition "from" in the title of every poem has been said to represent "ongoing processes of emergence and departure.” The previously referenced shifts in language, as well as the diverse visual cues, also contribute to a sense that this poetry is dealing with the same political and historical tensions as its subjects (Guam and Chamorros).