Blurbs

Tripas by Brandon Som (University of Georgia Press, 2023), Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 2024

"‘What is it we keep? What is obsolete?’ Tripas shows us the insides of conversations, family lineage, and technological objects as a line in itself—everything connected—the wires, the ‘piecework,’ the harmonics of English, Spanish, and Chinese, and the people in his family whose labor and language are tied and inextricably linked to material and matter. As the daughter of a microchips assembly-line worker, I have been waiting for this book from the grandson of a Motorola plant worker, and I see how these poems are fragments that are not fractured, but found, heard, recorded. Som’s poems are a ledger of love that shifts, traces, extends that which telephones often do: split distance and cut across time to bring us closer to what is created."

Sana by Maria Bolaños (Sampaguita Press, 2022)

Bolaños’ poems give soundscape and shelter to flowers expanding, to clouds migrating, to pressing pacing onto earth, and to Filipina women whose experiences are lived and more than tsismis. Sana is a pedagogy of locating origin stories that name the roots and flowers of familial, historical, and epistemological pain.

If God is a Virus by Seema Yasmin (Haymarket Books, 2021)

These poems are a testament to sitting with strata about how people are treated and rendered erroneously in reports and studies, in appointments, in racist texts, and in people’s limited and grotesque imaginations and medical practices where life and death are a matter of words. Her work proves that poetry and public health together make and contain medical language, which makes the language of an epidemic more visible, more veracious. Every page has its own rhythm–some as odes to women in her lineage, others as a pathology of public collapse. What breaks through is a voice of interiority telling us what’s not told about our bodies and what it means to function.

We Are No Longer Babaylan by Elsa Valmidiano (New Rivers Press, 2020)

Every word of We Are No Longer Babaylan brilliantly hooks with and hinges on magic, and the magic of possibility. Valmidiano frames the ancient, persistent pain that hammers and chisels Filipina American knowledge with ritual and unrest. She articulates screams and silences, exalting that in order to engage with the Filipina, female, and storied being is to see her in all of her palimpsests. Her prose about the mysteries of waiting, family in manifold forms, and Pinay friendship, features a heartfelt, phenomenal voice declaring, time and time again, women’s bodies–of writing, of work, of ceremony–theirs to narrate and protect.

Susurros A Mi Padre by Erick Sáenz (The Operating System, 2018)

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"Let this book show you an interrogation and migration of story, where story is made of secrets: from Monterrey to Los Angeles to San José and back; through wanting to know one's father, and ultimately, oneself. In this candid, real-time narrative, Erick Sáenz sits with the discomfort and mystery of words in Spanish and English that [pass time], where time is a summation of moments, questions, memories; and where passing is actively standing watch at a life that’s yours. Call it disenfranchised grief—or listen when he asks, 'What is it like growing up landlocked?'—or when he affects, 'Este es mi elogia, papi' with the crushing beauty of a confession. Sáenz writes fatherlessness, restlessness, and distance and othering as double consciousness. This story is a slow, heartfelt corrido unveiling the poetics of loss.

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We Remain Traditional by Sylvia Chan (University Press of Colorado, 2018)

“Sometimes, what I hear, I believe.” Sylvia Chan’s We Remain Traditional is a score of sound upon breakwater. Commanding and sifting through language the way a musician harnesses emotion and craft into playing an instrument and bellowing, Chan produces documentation of music in the travels and revels of everyday life: “my history gets lost in a war” turntables with “I wonder which pop icon will outspeak the other.” Music as the migration of sound is multiplied present tense: “what’s cleft is an introspective singer knowing how feet feel,” and “my mother’s Singer, a final sales item from Sears.” Chan chooses, names—in lyrics broken and pieced by time, practice, Adam, and Chinese/American histories—how music is a patterned force of many moments stacked, moving forward, and pulling back.

excerpt of "Foreword" to delilah's daughter by Kim Davalos, 2017

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This book is for all of the women that a woman could possibly be in her lifetime. For all of the women who can grow and grow girls into women or not, into elders, raise them, and see how they can live–full, joyous, blooming, changing. Kimberly Davalos writes with a tender ferocity that calls on you to reflect, allows you in on her process of self-love, self-growth, self-care, and struggle–and how lucky we are to witness a genuine, kind soul this way. Davalos’s poetry is proof that young girls and women of color can become light, magic, power, and beauty, in growing up and growing older (“good thing / i am many women.”)

Split by Denise Benavides (Kórima Press, 2016)

What’s a poem to god? What’s a god to a mom? What’s a parent to a non-believer? Benavides summons these questions with a sharpened rosary dipped in blood ink, half relic and half stake that meets the eyes with each poem that drives it into the heart of the matter: a riot girl is weaponized cavalry in herself. In a testament of poems wrestling the multitudes and facets of religion, daughterhood, sex, and ________ through candid language, Benavides’s collection is an amalgamation of intense empathy and sorrow – not as a cause for alarm  – but as intent to move and reclaim Self. These poems reveal to the lovers and past selves the balancing of one’s inner light and darkness. The poems ask exhuming question-statements and answer back regarding our honest-to-goodness ungodliness.

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