zarvindale's reviews
49 reviews

I’ve read the zines on which some of the poems here appeared, so before diving into this fairly thick book I was already fully aware that this is Conchitina Cruz’s most unserious work so far. It’s a 173-page escape from the somber dictations of love that influenced her works. That’s not to say she’s no longer waxing poetic about love here. She still does, but she does so lightly. This collection is saturated with mockery and humor, with several allusions and a whole lot of personifications so as to prevent making the poems feel like viral one-liners by an edgy young adult on X (which is frequently and justifiably deadnamed as Twitter after a butthurt billionaire one day decided to replace it with a name akin to seedy porn sites). Each section shares the same format of one-sentence lines that are cut almost always without punctuations and are almost always disconnected from each other. Perhaps that is my main gripe about this book: there isn’t much variety in style, as if it’s a lengthy extension of the last lyrical sequence of the book that preceded this.

Revisited as part of my Conchitina Cruz reading marathon. As I’ve said in my review of her sophomore collection, her lyricism fares better in prose than line cuts. She displays expertise in navigating the city, and in this book, she dares to go beyond by mentioning countries as sites of histories. She manages to rethink postcards by reducing them into descriptions, which form images that provably differ with every reader according to experience and knowledge. She remembers hyperspecific details of memories, and so as not to forget these memories, she writes them down and collects them in this book, as if they’re notes from an exhibition she attended. These memories as well as the overall format are arranged quite formally, but the narrative is meandering. And that’s the point! The connection among images is often interrupted throughout the sections and lyric sequences because the goal is not to be completely coherent, but to summon some sense of emotion, perhaps wistfulness, as we jump from one random yet relatable image to another.

My first read of 2024! I’m very excited to start my year with this book because I vowed to myself that I wouldn’t begin reading Conchitina Cruz’s works until I owned all of them. I had to read her debut before I could move forward to the next, which I got a copy of only in the last month of the previous year. I couldn’t allow my reading momentum to be interrupted.

I know the most popular poem from this astounding debut poetry collection is “Alunsina takes a walk in the rain.” I would beg to differ, and I cannot stress this enough: Conchitina Cruz, whose “Dear City,” was introduced to me through a Humanities class back in college, is insane for beginning this book with a poem that bears the line, “What comes from heaven is always a blessing,” then ending it with a poem about ash that’s likened to/mistaken as rain and snow, both of which come from the sky.

She sort of teases her readers too by titling one of her poems “What is it about tenderness,” since this book, from start to finish, is incredibly tender in tone and theme. As corny as it may sound, she uses the city as a geographical site to map her desire. She takes us through the grittiness of roads and alleyways, where there exist houses and buildings that serve as sites of many histories and memories, each of which refers to the collective and individual senses. There seems to be no escape for the persona in this collection because everywhere she goes and everything she sees in the city reminds her of something that impacted her emotionally in the past. In the wake of this self-awareness, she creates musings to relieve her of the emotions that fully overcome her, at the expense of bringing about wistfulness on the people, the readers, who are able to make sense of her thoughts.

This is the short story collection I have finished the fastest. In three days, I got to dive into this semi-autobiographical sequel of H. Arlo Nimmo’s the Songs of Salanda, another short story collection which I hold highly and dear to my heart. Nimmo’s writing is mainly informed of experience; he wrote both fiction and nonfiction books about the people he’s met, the places he’s been, and the pleasures and tragedies he’s undergone during his years-long stay in the Sulu archipelago as part of his anthropological research. Although he’s white, his use of the English language is never difficult to read. In fact, it feels close to Philippine English. I have to mention this because writing is often misconstrued as an undertaking that needs to be done sophisticatedly in terms of style, when the challenge for writers these days is to make their works accessible to the average reader. Nimmo is also adept at blending his personal experiences with fictional events. Who knows which of the things that are happening in this book are true. The goal is for a piece of writing to grant wisdom, supply information, or simply entertain. Nimmo, through his stories which are often marked with wistfulness, achieves all of those.

Upon reading the first few stories from this second book by Anna Felicia Sanchez, I immediately deduced that I might be heading into young adult fiction. Many of the characters here are students, majority of which are going through personal troubles and mental health issues. The approach, if I recall correctly, is starkly different from Sanchez’s first collection. But as I flipped the pages further, I became aware that the characters are moving past youth and the themes are becoming more mature. Reading this feels like I am growing older and older with the characters, whose stories offer wisdom and wistfulness.

It took me more than eight months to finish this book. The problem, however, lies in me; I got disinterested in reading in general sometime in February, and my curioisity led me to other pursuits elsewhere.

This is not a difficult read. When I went back in October to pick up where I left off, I reached the end of the book in three days. Richard Bolisay’s writing, just like in his first book, is simple yet significant. He writes in the most accessible way possible to help the readers easily understand his observations and ruminations about Philippine cinema and the people behind it. Through profiles and reviews that he wrote within a decade, he documents a rich history of Philippine cinema. He acknowledges as a critic the importance of writing about film; it is a way to immortalize the developments that have taken place as well as it is a way to resist erasure.

I was introduced to the works of Jaymee Siao by my Humanities instructor back in college. Her essay on monuments, billboards, and footbridges was an assigned text for that class. That essay (whose title I forgot, unfortunately) opened my eyes to the possible functions of these three commonly overlooked objects that make up Metro Manila’s urban landscape. That essay made me admire Siao and her interpretations of Philippine culture. (Later on, I would formally meet her since she served as a guest editor for the literary folio of the campus paper for which I was a staffer. How I wish I officially became her student. I’ve heard lots of great things about her and her teaching styles through students from UST’s Literature program.)

Her book, Enshrining the Nation, isn’t far from that essay content-wise. Just as that essay critiques monuments, so does this incisive work. We can even say that this book is an extension of that essay. Here, she manages to survey, question, and ultimately provide insights about monuments in the Philippines. She begins with sharing examples of the many forms of monuments from the precolonial to the postcolonial periods, then she interrogates the purpose of these monuments to Filipinos in relation to collective memory. Personally, I’m a little on the fence about how majority of the chapters were written. Siao, however, manages to compose an accessible yet elevated conclusion by the end of the book. From what I understood, she claims that monuments, despite their intended purpose of remembering, have meanings that depend on the interpretation of the people for which they are made. These people, in return, can use these monuments to shape their nation.

I was surprised to know that Alex Tizon’s My Family’s Slave prompted this entire monograph. The (in)famous essay was an assigned reading in one of my feature writing classes back in college. I was seated in the front row on the day my instructor asked: “What did you think of the essay?” To which I responded: “It made me mad.” The essay is Tizon’s means of telling his readers that he in no way shared the cruelty his family had inflicted on their housemaid. The manner with which he approached the issue was infuriatingly passive. He was fully aware of the abuse and trafficking, of the modern-day slavery his family had deliberately instituted within the four corners of their house, yet at no point in his life did he try to stop them. Later on, he must have felt so guilty he had to pay their housemaid back by treating her kindly until she died. To fully absolve himself, he wrote a lengthy essay, which was categorized as long-form journalism and eventually as “creative nonfiction,” that adheres to stylistic choices whose core purpose is to convince his readers that he did nothing wrong. It was published posthumously, which I personally consider as another sinister way for him to evade the consequences of his unreasonable inaction and sly craftsmanship.

Conchitina Cruz, who’s as sharp as ever, validates my opinion about Tizon and his essay. She calls out the individuals and institutions behind the emergence of creative nonfiction, a relatively recent genre under which nonfiction works such as the essay fall as long as the work adheres to a certain set of guidelines that upholds literariness and, in return, erases works that belong outside the category. Although mainly directed toward the stylistic choices of Tizon’s essay and other similar works, the monograph remains insightful with regard to the recent developments pertaining to writing. Cruz calls for the rejection of the genre that restricts nonfiction, specifically the essay, inside a fence of literary standards mostly deployed in creative writing schools and by writers who have made their marks in the industry. The point is to rise above, if not return to, the original definition of the essay in order to welcome rather than exclude its possible forms. Most importantly: she reminds the writer to be more conscious of their “positionality” when writing, and the reader to be more critical of works that are considered well-written but “unmediated” and complicit in perpetuating injustice.

I was introduced to this book by one of my editors at the campus paper I was a staff of back in college. My editor uploaded a copy of it to our group on Facebook out of sincerity, to help us fend off any sense of trepidation that we might have been facing at the time as writers. Suffice to say: I bore witness to the various editions of this book. I bore witness to the changes, to the additions that have appeared up to this new edition under Paper Trail Projects.

I consider this as Adam David’s ambitious literary exercise. He was eager in interepreting a single yet popular line from an equally popular song by the Filipino band Eraserheads, and that eagerness translated fruitfully. He uses, manipulates both the printed text and images to spew more than a hundred variations of “Kamukha mo si Paraluman noong tayo ay bata pa.” Through this undertaking, he showcases his talent, his knowledge of established yet unfamiliar concepts that govern writing, and his wit. The El Bimbo Variations is a challenging book to finish, but he was clearly up to the challenge to stretch his creativity and imagination, and to entertain as well as inspire writers to rise above the literary and structural restraints in order to emphasize the “creative” in creative writing.