Gravities of Center by (the very cool) Barbara Jane Reyes

On my (growing) "to order" list:

text from the Arkipelago Website:

ARKIPELAGO PUBLISHING is proud to announce the release of Gravities of Center by Barbara Jane Reyes.


Contained in this collection are poems and prose pieces which exhibit Barbara’s oftentimes eclectic style / sensibilities and willingness to experiment with form and language. With serious and playful poems very much rooted in San Francisco Bay Area urban and suburban cultures, settings, and vernaculars, a geographically faraway Philippines is never absent from this Pilipina American writer’s consciousness. Consistent throughout Gravities of Center are themes of longing, desire, diaspora, postcoloniality, feminism, and coming of age.

"...to experience Barbara's poems is to learn about the specifics of a Pilipina's experience. And it is also to experience the ‘universality’ of desire and loss — that is, despite the consistency of losses, the stubbornness of never-ending desire ... by engaging us all in the poetry of Desire, you need to be as present as Barbara is in her poems. So enter these poems, and stay a while."

---Eileen Tabios, from her Preface to GRAVITIES


"Intelligent, energetic, and inventive, Reyes’s writing is nourished by the confluence of cultures at which she resides as an urban twenty-first century Pilipina American. Seen as both a post-colonial chronicle and an intimate exploration of self, community, and history, Gravities of Center hovers between conventional poetry or prose, bending the genres until what emerges is a work that will illuminate us like 'garnet crystalline fire…burning, to light the way back home' ."

---Jaime Jacinto, author of HEAVEN IS JUST ANOTHER COUNTRY

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Go Here to read Roger Pao's take on B. Jane Reyes' poem "[ave maria]"
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Go Here to visit Arkipelago Publishing, Filipino and Filipino American writers, and order B. Jane Reyes' book
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Book recently ordered---Shin Yu Pai's Equivalence
CD recently bought (or burned by a friend)---Audioslave's New Record
Favorite New (Old) Band---At the Drive In