Post by shayepoet on Jul 13, 2008 4:45:36 GMT 2
Juan Luna's Revolver
Luisa A. Igloria
The poems in Juan Luna's Revolver both address history and attempt to transcend it through their exploration of the complexity of diaspora. Attending to the legacy of colonial and postcolonial encounters, Luisa A. Igloria has crafted poems that create links of sympathetic human understanding, even as they revisit difficult histories and pose necessary questions about place, power, displacement, nostalgia, beauty, and human resilience in conditions of alienation and duress.
Igloria traces journeys made by Filipinos in the global diaspora that began since the encounter with European and American colonial powers. Her poems allude to historical figures such as the Filipino painter Juan Luna and the novelist and national hero José Rizal, as well as the eleven hundred indigenous Filipinos brought to serve as live exhibits in the 1904 Missouri World's Fair. The image of the revolver fired by Juan Luna reverberates throughout the collection, raising to high relief how separation and exile have shaped concepts of identity, nationality, and possibility.
Suffused with gorgeous imagery and nuanced emotion, Igloria's poetry achieves an intimacy fostered by gem-like phrases set within a politically-charged context speaking both to the personal and the collective.
Sample poem:
La indolencia de los Filipinos…
Intimacy deserves a closer look
on the boulevards, where a mural assembles nightly.
Bodies the hue of scrap metal beneath train tracks,
feathered by neon. My friend the pathologist walks
back to Manila hotel, cuts through the park and comes
across lit fires in iron gratings; the third eye
of a Sanyo rice cooker blinks the hours from a billboard.
A man scrubs himself with a pumice stone in the fountain,
and a family of four goes to sleep next to their faded mango trishaw;
so languid even in repose, he writes, and I could tell him how
here as in that part of the world, the spirit relinquishes itself:
lizards free-fall to the ground, bells' tongues rend the Angelus—
but like history he expounds on the imprecision of Chinese
water-clocks and the industry of Northerners, the brighter
ink of spiked holly berries against white, the augur-shaped
bodies of tropical parasites, the people that scan
the skies for rain and omen birds, the fear of avian flu.
Praise for Juan Luna's Revolver:
"In Juan Luna's Revolver, Luisa Igloria establishes herself as a singular and revelatory voice in American poetry. Here, she explores the dichotomy of Filipino: interwoven yet hermetically singular, acquisitive yet inventive, docile yet amok. Her engrossing poems hide, behind their gorgeous scrims, a bristling wall of spears."
—Sabina Murray, author of Forgery, A Carnivore's Inquiry, and The Caprices
" 'What a world to have lived in, to have arrived in,' Luisa Igloria writes early on in this brilliant collection that explores colonization and cultural displacement, and how the artist must live in the aftermath of both. Even when she writes about places many miles away, Igloria constructs a luminous portrait of what is utterly human and ultimately familiar. These poems reveal a poet's devoted to the truth of her craft."
—Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, author of Outlandish Blues and Red Clay Suite
"When I read a Luisa Igloria poem, a bright enchanted light falls over my being. Juan Luna's Revolver is Igloria's best work to date. These poems never let us forget they are wrought from an immigrant's love for family, country, and the history of the reinvented self."
—Virgil Suarez, author of 90 Miles
"In sure and compelling measures, with richly textured turns, and attending to the mystery of matter, Luisa Igloria's poems offer a powerfully tangible world, and a world within, and a world beyond."
—Scott Cairns, author of Compass of Affection: Poems New and Selected
About the author:
Luisa A. Igloria (previously published as Maria Luisa Aguilar-Cariño) is a tenured Associate Professor in the MFA Creative Writing Program and Department of English, Old Dominion University. Her work has appeared or will be forthcoming in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Crab Orchard Review, The Missouri Review, Indiana Review, Poetry East, Smartish Pace, Rattle, The North American Review, Bellingham Review, Shearsman (UK), PRISM International (Canada), Poetry Salzburg Review (Austria), The Asian Pacific American Journal, and TriQuarterly.
Various national and international literary awards include the 2009 Ernest Sandeen Poetry Prize for Juan Luna's Revolver (forthcoming, the University of Notre Dame Press), the 2007 49th Parallel Poetry Prize (selected by Carolyne Wright for the Bellingham Review), the 2007 James Hearst Poetry Prize (selected by former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser for the North American Review); Finalist, the 2007 Lynda Hull Memorial Prize in Poetry (Crazyhorse); Finalist, the 2007 Indiana Review Poetry Prize; the 2006 National Writers Union Poetry Prize (selected by Adrienne Rich); the 2006 Richard Peterson Poetry Prize (Crab Orchard Review); the 2006 Stephen Dunn Award for Poetry; Finalist, the 2005 George Bogin Memorial Award for Poetry (Poetry Society of America, selected by Joy Harjo); the 2004 Fugue Poetry Prize(selected by Ellen Bryant Voigt); Finalist, the 2003 Larry Levis Editors Prize for Poetry from The Missouri Review; Finalist, the 2003 Dorset Prize (Tupelo Press); the first Sylvia Clare Brown Fellowship, Ragdale Foundation (2007); a 2003 partial fellowship to the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg; two Pushcart Prize nominations; a 1998 Fellowship at the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers in Lasswade, the Midlothians, Scotland; and the 1998 George Kent Award for Poetry.
Originally from Baguio City in the Philippines, Luisa is also an eleven-time recipient of the Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for Literature in three genres (poetry, nonfiction, and short fiction); the Palanca award is the Philippines' highest literary distinction, equivalent to the Pulitzer. She has previously published nine books including Encanto (Anvil, 2004), In the Garden of the Three Islands (Moyer Bell/Asphodel, 1995), and most recently Trill & Mordent (WordTech Editions, fall 2005. Trill & Mordent was a Runner-up for the 2004 Editions Prize, the recipient of the 2005 Calatagan Award from the Philippine American Writers and Artists organization, nominated for the 9th annual Library of Virginia Literary Awards (poetry category) in 2006, and Co-Winner of the 2007 Global Filipino Literary Awards (poetry category).
Website: www.luisaigloria.com
Blog: www.lizardmeanders.blogspot.com
ISBN 10: 0-268-03178-9
ISBN 13: 978-0-268-03178-8
University of Notre Dame Press
Ernest Sandeen Prize Series, available for pre-order, 2009
Paper Edition, 104 pages, $18.00
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UND Press: undpress.nd.edu/book/P01279