Everyone I Love, Alive by Jason Bayani
(Omnidawn, 2025)
A review written in the immediate aftermath of Bad Bunny's
performance at the Super Bowl:
Despite its expert wielding of caesuras, Jason Bayani’s Everyone I love, Alive is a narratively dense poetry collection. And it should be, given its topic as full-frontally announced by its title. Loved ones deserve to be presented full-frontally, not elided by a poem’s and page’s white space.
And so we read about, for instance, not just family but specifically his family: “Marcelo,” “my grandmother” (versus “grandmother”), “my cousin,” “my aunt,” of course “my father” with his nickname of “Tikboy,” “my Uncle,” and “my friend.” He also writes of the over “5500” people, not just “people,” who died in drug wars, among others. The all of it appropriately reverses that strategy of presumably universalizing the poem to widen its reach; instead, identified are specific people likely to be unknown to many readers. I read Bayani’s approach as exemplifying what he says in “Someday, Again”: to be “narrative / [that] is not sentiment.”
But we read about Bayani’s loved ones amidst the poet’s philosophizing about what makes our world a troubled one. And so when I came to his poem “Fracture” set in about the middle of the collection, I felt as if I’d reached some sort of core or root to the poetry collection. I kept mentally returning to this poem as I read and re-read the entire book. Here is an excerpt from the poem that grounded me as I read all the poems in the collection:
“I never said once that my face hurt / because everything hurt”—that, there, is the harsh truth of human history. Why deny it? But it takes courage and a massive amount of self-awareness to not turn one’s gaze from that truth and mask it with what some would label “faith.” Faith is useless when it’s not tethered to reality… even if that reality is a form of illusion like desire. (Was that last sentence paradoxical? So, too, is humanity and poetry.)
The last six lines of “Fracture” (starting with “I am always scoffing at the notion”) has a truth so deep it’s both the sword that stabbed deeply as well as the wound it caused that will never heal. We should understand our own nature. But many of us won’t—can’t—and fall to the trap of bliss as defined by ignorance.
Thus, I am grateful for how the collection ends, specifically with the last six poems: “Bioluminescent Worms,” “This One Starts in the Middle,” “The Story is the Love Language,” “Song,” “Galactus: Devourer of Words,” and “Mixtape.”
In all these poems, there are lines upon which the pained reader might rest… and recover. Yes, of course the ultimate medicine is love. But the message isn’t the poetry—it’s also how Bayani articulates it—in the same way “Bad Bunny” articulated what he meant by “LOVE” during his 2026 Super Bowl performance. Let’s read these and be restored.
From “Bioluminescent Worms”—
From “This One Starts in the Middle”—
From “The Story is the Love Language”—
From “Song”—
From “Galactus: Devourer of Words”—
From “Mixtape”—
May Jason Bayani—may we all—be able to effect love so that we can be surrounded with it. Only when your seed is love can you be surrounded by flowers. Understand Bad Bunny: read this book, Jason Bayani’s EVERYONE I LOVE, ALIVE.
*****
Eileen R. Tabios has released books of poetry, fiction, essays, art and experimental prose from publishers around the world. Recent publications include a children’s book Tata Efren’s Forever Laughter (with Mel Vera Cruz and Jeannie E. Celestial); the novels The Balikbayan Artist and DoveLion; the poetry collections Engkanto in the Diaspora and Because I Love You, I Become War; an autobiography The Inventor: A Poet's Transcolonial Autobiography; the short story collections The Erotic Space Around Art Objects and Getting To One; and an art monograph Drawing Six Directions. More information is at https://eileenrtabios.com
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