The Ampersand series gathers two poetry collections by poet Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta. Burning Houses explores the internal movements of loss while Hush Harbor investigates what poet Rachel Rose describes as “the fraught love and power dynamics between men and women, colonizer and colonized.” Lacuesta also tests the limits of her lyrical verse against the range of emotions that empowers them. Often the result is both song and silence, meaning and nonsense, and the interchangeability of all the terms.