Say tomorrow doesn’t come, a mantra i’ve repeated to myself throughout the years the first time i encountered it in the poem, The Conditional. For the past couple of years, i’ve come back to the collection Bright Dead Things, just to remind myself that living a life has always been difficult, that there will always be circumstances to remind you how hard one has to fight just to keep one. This year, I’m learning to live with these things that may arise, no matter how unpredictable. Maybe that would be enough.
Books (and other things) i’ve read this year have taught me the art of how to finish, to interrupt, and to revisit. Admittedly getting to that 50/50 books this year were also consisted of books I didn’t bother to finish or books I’ve decided to revisit just to compensate the lack of enjoyment i had from the former. Nevertheless, I had a good time discovering things I was surprisingly into, and also one’s that constantly reminded me how to live, filled with delight and difficulty.
Books!
how do you measure a year in the life? maybe the current metric is no longer enough in our current time constantly surrounded by crisis. in life-times of becoming human, neferti tadiar proposes the metric of life-times in redefining our humanity: what is waste and what is value, what is creative, what is a waste of time. this attempt at redefining in the most fluid sense of who gets to be human, in a society that constantly organizes and structures towards uncertain parameters of execution, discrimination, and, dictation. what if the debating on humanity is just pure dissolution of the conventions set in the mainstream. after all, we can imagine a different kind of political + communal sphere, especially when the soils for foundation is still yet to be planted on.
terra and i have always bonded on speculative fiction, it’s ways of threading into supernatural and fantastical elements as a means of pondering our current realities is indeed a refreshing take on fiction’s supposed means of escapism. imagining instead towards reclaiming. instructions on how to disappear, doesn’t necessarily tell the answers on how to navigate our own vulnerabilities, it instead posits possibilities to explore and unpack these matters of the heart. removing the fog of tumult and ambiguities and to reveal whatever has been missing underneath.
in the dream house allows us to enter. the cracks may be seeping from the ceiling, the wallpaper rips revealing the grayish hue of the drywall , the wooden stairway appears to be slowly eaten up by termites, it still leads us the way towards understanding carmen maria machado’s catharsis: when the promise of queer utopia fails you, how does one recover? an immediate exit may not suffice when it begets queer love as failure. but seeing through the illusion of it all may allow one to build a solid structure, a home emerging from the concrete beyond our dreams.
the want to write more personal pieces always comes with a balancing act of inputting reality + creativity into each piece. partial views examines this in the context of the rise of the personal essay in the mainstream. questioning its truth, integrity, and honesty, conchintina cruz challenges the supposed confessional nature of the essay, demanding beyond the individualistic nature of the essayist:
“The personal is not exempt from relations of power, and to write without an awareness of class, gender, or race or without sensitivity to geographic and linguistic hierarchies risks turning one’s essay into a realm that mindlessly replicates prevailing inequities in the world at large.”
creativity when combined with personal experience demands a grounded reimagining, to live means to engage with the societal relations, consisting of institutions, hierarchies, and demographies. to be exclusive to such in writing or/and engaging with a personal account leaves nothing more but an empty projection of pervasive harmful realities or simply just a lazy act of isolation into one’s own world.
in the same vein as bright dead things reminds me of how to live, bago mo ako ipalaot reiterates this same principle in liberation. to be free means to persevere, to constantly acknowledge and exist in ways of honoring not only ourselves but those who have come before and after us. to let these people and communities simmer and linger in a way we can still see the fire igniting brightly, floating gently through the sea.
the task of writing postcolonial love poem is felt in the weight of interconnectedness in natalie diaz’s suite. The Colorado River is the most endangered river in the United States—also, it is a part of my body. / I carry a river. It is who I am: …This is not a metaphor. the outpouring of their intergenerational trauma reflected on their lands, their bodies, their people is a bold act of love and care. a love poem that has been written for centuries and continues to be fleshed out till the present.
trying to read between the lines is a delight in joshua ip’s footnotes on falling. this poetry suite encourages experimentation and play, abstracting images from images, from vignettes, from language, from objects into endless poetry. there’s a lot of stumbling and a lot of fumbling to encounter the metaphors in this book, but still it’s a worthy and admiring effort to piece together such lovely continuous conclusions. and isn’t that the spirit of poetry? to be in constant movement with anything and everything out there?
treating a wound entails observation. to look at it and study each detail and crevice, to recall the cause of it towards healing. to acknowledge this pain is encouraged by ada limon in her collection, the hurting kind. she herself embraces this vulnerability, I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers. to point out to whatever pains us, to be able to voice it out has always been in our lineage. this ringing urge constantly knocking even if the words fail us, to know i’ve been hurt.
people we meet on vacation was my exposure therapy into romance novels. i’ve always had apprehension (especially towards heteronormative ones) in the idea of reading a book version of a romcom or hallmark movie, but this one really changed my mind. the main couple wasn’t unnecessarily complicated, their chemistry was well-built in their well written banter, and the main conflict was as simple as a will-they, won’t they but mixed with actually acknowledging their personal baggages! idk for this one the str8s may have a point !
the sucker provides an exploration of friendship under the sea. the estranged relationship between the EJ and Dani sets the current of their supposedly simple dilemma: sharing their discovery or maintaining its secrecy. there’s a lot of tension uncovered from the glimpses of their past, mostly lacking dialogue as if it’s something they’ve left to sink underneath the depths of the ocean. we’re only able to recognize their faces as they turn to each other, trying to answer which one of them was always at the losing end of it all.
Zines!
pinpointing specific locales in writing is a cliche at this point, but lugar lang: mga tula, abstracts that idea into turning the act of poetry into a cartographic necessity. mapping their existence and embedding the geography as a hand-in-hand effort towards making sense of their socio-political duties.
Malinaw rito,/ sa likod ng kasukalan, ang mga yapak ng aking/ nakaraang diwa—ang pagkadalubhasa sa agos ng panahon/ at buhay.
to simply walk away is defined as the french exit. an exit with no apologies, no drama, no permissions. what does it mean to simply fall out of love? the figure skater constantly cornered by the local interviewer for their retirement: was it a deus ex machina? a lack of state support? a death in the family? there’s a constant anticipation of a climactic event, an opportunity to insert a big narrative especially if it’s about someone in the height of their career. but sometimes you gotta know when to bail
something stolen, something green is a reflective account on the temporality of desire. the poet proclaims you are my god of choice, maybe only for today that is their answer. as the color green is growth and new life and rebirth in its relentless, unsentimental cycle..….the green always returns and never stays. We get to keep nothing.
theory of indefensible space makes me recall the kogonada’s 2017 film columbus. though jan dennis destajo’s suite poses a response against the idea of barriers in architecture by surfacing the crevices beneath each structure, i can’t help but think of this threading an attempt of providing a space beyond the violence. a space that allows one to walk in and out freely and move the structures that surround them, in the same vein casey and jin does all over their humble town.
dugtungan doesn’t try to hide being an anthology, but it does present itself so cohesively that you forget it is one. the entire piece greatly reminds me of ocean vuong’s response in a q&a on instagram:
“Collaboration and regeneration, as alternatives, are not centered enough…you can build alongside it and make work of idiosyncratic distinctions via confluence over conquest
to build over each other instead of toppling down, especially to tell stories of each other’s interconnected experiences is an earnest effort towards this alternative future.
Linkity LINKS!
i only know ada limon bec of u