zarvindale's reviews
49 reviews

Angelo Suarez certainly likes to demonstrate his lust, wit, and knowledge in poetry. In this second collection, published when he was 20 and still studying, each section strictly caters to a specific subject: the first for his lover, the second for writing, the third for politics and humor. The third amused me the most, the second befuddled me, the first terrified me, a queer acespec reader, with its cishet narrative. I can argue that the book is simply a fair match with the one that precedes it. Suarez knows how to twist language to whatever shape he wants it to look, and I can do nothing but be still as a writer showcases his talent.

This book is proof that the youth can match the talents of veterans. Angelo Suarez is a gift to Philippine literature. He debuted a whole poetry collection at 19, and he followed it shortly after with another. Humor abounds here, as well as poetry conventions and the attempts to break them. Suarez stretches literary devices and logic to talk about his family, his lover, his country, and basically everything else that comes to his mind. His aggression is present and never leaves, and translates to lust and care. Reading this book feels like I am pushed to the wall, with my back against it, by a delirious man who positions his forearm against my neck, as if it’s a blade ready to slit my throat, just so he can make me listen to his musings, all of which bear extreme insights and empty threats.

Desire is adjacent to danger in the second poetry collection of Ned Parfan. Compared to his debut, the grip in language here is much tighter, and there’s skillful demonstration of transmogrifying the simplest sentence structures into slithering sensuality. In the Murmur Asylum, the persona attaches trauma to sex. Here, the persona acknowledges that thrill is prerequisite for pleasure; without thrill, the act, such as sex, won’t be as sweet as imagined.

Go beyond reading the book’s title and listen to it: it’s a command. An imperative. So follow. Obey. Parfan urges you to think of what you covet the most as the thing that glints at night as you look past the window of a bus you’re in. The thing will willingly tilt and bend if you tell it so with your stare. The moment it does, bloom, like the flowers on the book’s yellow cover.

Poetry for healing. I must admit I had raised an eyebrow several times the moment I sensed the pastiche of images of the city and images of child abuse early into this debut collection. When I got to the end, I had officially grasped the one theme that unites the poems: trauma. The obvious trauma from sexual assault, and the obvious trauma from a deluge. We may also see glimmers of parallelism between the two subjects: there is flood on the streets as much as there as a flood of fear during rape. However we view them, there is no denying of the shock the persona felt upon experiencing such horrors. We are urged to feel for this persona, for it’s through lyricism can this persona lay down burdens, even if the lyricism can sometimes sound cheesy or irrational. But irrational is what commonly happens when we’re afraid, is it not?

I am here to say that Mark Anthony Cayanan is so brave for writing that last long poem about shame. I have read Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice back in college for a final paper in one of my literature classes. It is indeed an classic queer novella, which narrates old Aschenbach’s desire for youthful Tadzio. From the I in Narcissus to the You in Except you enthrall me, Cayanan moves to He in this third poetry collection. The persona wears the body, with all its frailties, of Aschenbach and transports it into present day. This poetry collection is sort of a modern retelling of the novella, if we think about it. Above all, it’s a confession, one that’s made to the beloved but more so confided to the reader, whether they like it or not. We may deeply feel embarrassment for the persona here, but, in the lingo of the internet nowadays, we cannot deny that the persona’s feelings are “real.”

This second poetry collection by Mark Anthony Cayanan is the extension/culmination of Shall We Be Kind and Suffer Each Other, a rather shorter book that’s tight in lyricism and loose in emotions. From the I in Narcissus, Cayanan moves to You, who submerges the speaker in an unnerving tide of desire and judgment. If the title of the collection from which some of the poems here have appeared is an invitation/suggestion, the title of this book is the response.

Desire assumes and wears different forms, ranging from mythology to pop culture, in Mark Anthony Cayanan’s first collection of poems. There is utmost concern for form as much as there is utmost concern for lyricism, so much so that the writing style relentlessly stands up to conventions. Here, the objective is to be aware of and to situtare oneself in the world. Amid the image-building, the poetry must appear/feel fluid as water and solid as a mirror.

Sometimes the best poetry collections are the shortest ones. The poems here, which as far as I can remember also appear in Mark Anthony Cayanan’s second book, are creative as they are bizarre and lyrical. Homoeroticism laces the poems, which bounce from prosaic forms to the classic stanzas. Cayanan’s writing style reminds me of Conchitina Cruz, with the additional disregard for rules, which manifests in the form of incomplete sentences and general incoherence. The result is a brief book that’s innovative while emotional.

This collaboration carries the earlier versions of the poems that would later make up Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta’s third poetry collection Hush Harbor. Some of the poems lose their line cuts here and turn into prose poems. One of them doesn’t yet have its official title while another seems to be an exclusive to this book.

I have loved Hush Harbor, so I obviously extend that love to this collaboration. What makes me look forward to this is Frances Cannon’s attempts at translating Mookie’s poems into illustrations and new lyrical verses. To my surprise, Frances was able to keep up! She managed to not only translate but also interpret: she borrows some of the lines from Mookie’s poems, inserts her own knowledge in between, and creates simpler, if not simplified, iterations, majority of which are infused with narrative.

Frances’s illustrations, meanwhile, are just as profound as the poems and translations. Sometimes it feels like the illustrations accompany Frances’s verses more than Mookie’s.

At this point I have come to demand more collaborations of the sort from poets and illustrators. Both individuals go hand in hand as each tries to concretize abstract ideas in order to come up with fresh outputs.

It is through this poetry collection that I discovered in myself my dislike for poems (and, as a result, poets) that dramatize world issues and personal trauma. Violence is brimming in this fourth book by Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta, and the treatment of that violence is far from sensitive as we’d expect nowadays. The clichés here are tired, and so are the forced attempts at displaying knowledge and awareness of tension and unrest as the whole world grapples with a crisis. The epilogue is cute; the rest is a letdown.