POST BOOK: LUISA A. IGLORIA

  The Halo-Halo Review is pleased to interview authors in the aftermath of their books’ releases. This issue’s featured authors include Luisa A. Igloria. 

What is your most recent book?

CAULBEARER: Poems
(Immigrant Writing Series Prize)

BOOK LINK

Who published and when was it released?
Black Lawrence Press; August 2024



What has been the response/what has surprised you most about the response?

There's been a wonderfully positive response to this book!

In January, my publisher informed me that they'd do another print run. It's been fun to read at various events and programs both in person and virtually, sometimes together with other poet friends. 

At in-person programs, like in early April at my Chicago book launch events, it was so affirming to hear which poems made some of the most powerful connections to readers (including a few who just happened to walk into the event)— the erasure poems, the manananggal poem; the poem I wrote on Magellan's slave and interpreter Enrique (Black Henry), my poem on Baguio City as a colonial hill station in which, my discussant M.G. Bertulfo astutely perceived, I do not outright name the American architect who drew up the city plans— which gesture she then interpreted as a strategy disruptive of the colonial tendency to write over indigenous lands and territories. 

I'd love to bring Caulbearer to more audiences, classrooms, and poetry programs.

Tell me something not obvious or known about the book.

Perhaps this isn't immediately obvious— unless you go to the page listing my book at Black Lawrence Press: there is a study/reading/teaching guide which I created, and it's downloadable and printable from there (free); my youngest daughter Gabriela did all the artwork for it. I also have printed copies (in color) which I bound by hand; I sell them at cost, plus shipping (you can DM me). 

Poetry Daily also asked me to write about the title poem from my book, as part of their "What Sparks Poetry" series. 

What are you working on right now?

I'm reviewing and polishing 2 new poetry manuscripts that I started sending out in the middle of last year; they've placed finalist or received "highly commended" or "manuscript of exceptional merit," which tells me that they're making connections to readers. 

I'm beginning to work more in earnest on a memoir-in-essays that's been simmering in the back of my mind for many years. 

Also, I've been doing more visual art lately— collage, watercolors, book-binding.

*****

Poet, writer, and translator Luisa A. Igloria is the winner of the 2023 Immigrant Series Prize for poetry (Black Lawrence Press) for Caulbearer (2024). She is the author of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Co-Winner, 2019 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Prize, Southern Illinois University Press, 2020), The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2018), and 12 other books. She was the inaugural recipient of the 2015 Resurgence Poetry Prize, UK—the world’s first major award for ecopoetry (now known as the Ginkgo Prize), selected by a panel headed by former UK Poet Laureate Andrew Motion. She is lead editor, along with co-editors Aileen Cassinetto and Jeremy S. Hoffman, of Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States (Paloma Press, September 2023). Luisa is a Louis I. Jaffe Professor of English and Creative Writing in the MFA Program at Old Dominion University; she also leads workshops for and is a member of the board of The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk. During her appointed term as 20^th Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020-22), Emerita, the Academy of American Poets awarded her one of twenty-three Poet Laureate Fellowships in 2021, to support a program of public poetry projects. Author Links:  www.luisaigloria.com and https://linktr.ee/thepoetslizard

LOVE NOTES TO FILIPINO AUTHORS & ARTISTS - Issue 19

This Feature presents readers sharing some love about the talent of Filipino writers and artists. We welcome your participation. This section is for readers. You don't have to write "like a professional," "like a critic," "like an intellectual," "like a well-rounded reader," etc. Just write honestly about how you were moved. Live writers and artists (let alone the dead) don't get to hear enough from others who engage with their works (some may not even know all who comprise their audience). To know someone read their stories and poems or appreciated their artistry is to receive a gift. Just share from your heart. It will be more than enough. DEADLINE: Nov 15, 2025 for Issue #20. Duplications of authors/artists and more than one testimonial are fine.

Mangozine's Issue #19 Presents

 

Ava Avila on Monica Macansantos

Eileen Tabios on Linda Ty-Casper

E. San Juan, Jr. on Jason DeParle

Ava Avila on Nathan Go

Eileen Tabios on Eric Tinsay Valles

Ava Avila on H. Arlo Nimmo

Leny M. Strobel on Eileen R. Tabios

 

Ava Avila on Monica Macansantos

Following the sudden passing of her poet father, Monica Macansantos embarks on a journey back to the Philippines, seeking solace and understanding in her homeland. At the heart of her book, Returning to My Father's Kitchen, is a daughter's attempt to hold on to her father's memory through the food he loved to cook, the values he passed down, the language he treasured, and the home they shared in a changing country.

Each essay is special. Even when unpacking happy and painful moments, Macansantos writes with clarity and compassion. One of my favorite essays in the book is "Becoming A Writer: The Silences We Write Against" where she reflects on the disenfranchisement of Filipino voices in mainstream literature and the personal barriers writers must overcome to assert their narratives. As someone who is passionate about sharing books by Filipino authors, this deeply resonates with me. I think about my writer friends in Mindanao who continue to tell their stories in their own languages and in their own terms.

This book is both a personal memoir and a call to action for greater inclusivity, kindness, and the recognition of diverse voices in literature. I highly recommend this!

*

Eileen Tabios on Linda Ty-Casper

My two top take-aways from reading Linda Ty-Casper's memoir, LIVES REMEMBERED (PALH, 2025), make me fall in love with this writer far afar.

First, I appreciate her turn from a law career to be a writer of historical novels because she discovered books at one of Harvard’s libraries that misrepresented Philippine history, including calling the Philippine American War an “insurrection.” She decided to write an essay to refute the errors. But in doing so, she also discovered that most of those books had never even been checked out. So she decided then “to write a historical novel which might have more staying power/life outside the shelf.” She thought she would write just one but ended up writing several, and it’s notable that her novels have been read widely and reprinted, showing that she achieved her goal.

 

Second—but, truthfully, this is actually my top take-away—Linda Ty-Casper was in her early nineties when she finished writing and released this memoir. It's a time, as she discusses in her last chapter, to look back at her life. I believe she gives us all a lesson when she mentions her regrets to include the inability "to sustain kindness." In discussing this, she recalls being in a store buying ham and seeing an old man ask the server "for the piece of ham left on the knife she used to slice pieces for Dad" and "who left quickly [when the server] shook her head. I could have given him for what I got for Dad."

 

The life-long reverberation of being unkind or missing an opportunity to be kind—especially when a person is not really unkind—resonates and I can see how that can be a source of regret that one can find unforgettable. As described in her book, the incident seemed like something one might not even notice and quickly forget. But because of what it exemplified as regards kindness, it remains a haunting.

 

Linda Ty-Casper’s memoir, then, is not just a readable account on history but our humanity.

*

E. San Juan, Jr. on Jason DeParle

One of the most illuminative narratives of how OFWs adapt, resist and resign themselves to their situation is Jason DeParle’s A Good Provider is One Who Leaves. The title comes from the mother of the Portagana family who praises her siblings for working abroad. Survival requires travel to distant sources of subsistence and endurance of horrific adversities. DeParle traces the trajectory of two generations in which sacrifice and stoic accomodation define their ordeals in the Middle East, Singapore, Taiwan, Canada, the U.S. and cruise ships. While other accounts (for example, Montebon and Juvida) describe other schemes of survival and compromise, deParle focuses on the power of kinship networks, especially affective maternal ties, that substitute for ethnic or national ethos in keeping extended families together. However, DeParle and others either marginalize or neutralize colonial-racial-gender determinants in chronicling migrant difficulties. We are led to assume that this pattern of migration is the sure-fire formula for keeping souls and bodies together wherever OFW find themselves.

(Note. This is excerpted from RECOGNIZING.APOLINARIO.MABINI: Inquiries into the Struggle for Justice and Sovereignty by E. San Juan, Jr. (University of the Philippines Press, 2024)

*

Ava Avila on Nathan Go

Nathan Go was born and raised in Southern Philippines. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Program, his fiction has appeared in Ploughshares and the Bare Life Review, among others. He is a senior lecturer of creative writing at UP Mindanao and author of the novel Forgiving Imelda Marcos (Picador/MacMillan, 2024).

Here is an example of how not to judge a book by its cover. In this case, its title. Given my disdain of the Marcos’ persistent denial of human rights violations during the dictatorship, I would not pick up this book despite it being a work of fiction. But thanks to @bernicillin ‘s Rappler review, I gave the novel a second look. Suffice to say, I enjoyed reading it and was quite surprised by the ending!

Forgiving Imelda Marco begins as a letter from Lito, a father who is mortally sick, to his estranged son, a journalist in America. He promises a scoop: the story of a secret meeting between Imelda Marcos and Corazon Aquino years ago. Lito was once Corazon’s personal driver and her only companion on the trip from Manila to Baguio to meet Imelda. Throughout the long drive, Lito’s loyalty to his employer is pitted against his own moral uncertainty about Corazon’s desire to forgive Imelda.

“With all due respect, what makes you think you have the right to forgive Imelda Marcos?”

The plot is interesting and imaginative. Go is able to navigate an alternative history that examines the personal and national grief. Alone and dying in a hospital, Lito’s letters soon wanders into his past: his neglectful father; his struggles with poverty; and ultimately his separation from his own son. As a reader, I was left pondering about the meaning and possibility of forgiveness. Who exactly is entitled to forgive? In a most unexpected and brilliant way, the author concludes the story.

*

Eileen Tabios on Eric Tinsay Valles

Eric Tinsay Valles has released a bilingual English-Spanish poetry collection, After the Fall / Despues de la Caida with Spanish translator Maria Del Castillo Sucerquia. Valles’ collection thoughtfully considers the aftermaths of a wide variety of tragedies such as natural disasters, wars, financial crises, bomb explosions in public venues like nightclubs, religious rites gone awry, the collateral damage from former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drug lords, the collapse of the World Trade Center during 9-1-1, and the harsh realities of migration. He observes in the last two lines of “War of the worlds at Cochrane Lodge,”

 

Their hearts are not of stone so they break down:

They’ve never had soft pillows in Cochrane Lodge II. 

 

Cochrane Lodge II is a foreign migrant workers’ dormitory in Singapore. This compassionate poem begins with describing how the migrant workers are sequestered due to Covid. But as the above ending indicates, even before Covid, life has always been hard.

 

But Eric Tinsay Valles’ collection also rationalizes—preserves?—hope: “Flower in the Water” reminds how a bomb victim would not just recover but complete an Ironman competition.

 

Poetry, too, remains persistent with After the Fall’s very existence encouraging perseverance through poems like “Canticle for Three Young Poets.” The poem refers to British poets Gurney, Rosenberg and Owen who fought in World War I and reminds, “words are broken but perfume the air, / Radiant like red poppies in a vase.”

*

Ava Avila on H. Arlo Nimmo

In the mid-1960s, H. Arlo Nimmo conducted two years of anthropological field research in southern Philippines among the nomadic boat-dwelling Sama Dilaut. Part memoir, part ethnography but mostly fiction, A Very Far Place is inspired by some of the people, places, and events Nimmo encountered during those years.

I haven’t been to the province but Nimmo wrote about a Tawi-Tawi that is quite different from the current media portrayal. The southern islands in his stories are pristine and unspoiled, a paradise before internal conflicts overwhelmed them.

Unlike those who take brief visits to the islands and make misleading accounts, Nimmo learned the language of Sama Dilaut and participated in their lives. He ceased being a stranger and this is evident in his writings. While the names of places, characters, and events are largely fictitious, as a reader, I can tell that the stories are true to the culture and geography of Tawi-Tawi in the 1960s. Stories include a Filipino man seeking beauty and comfort denied him in Manila; the tragic ill-fated voyage of a young family; a Jewish woman and a German man who carry their mutual enmity to the other side of the world; a teenage couple divided by their families’ feud; and a strange house on a river filled with dead animals. 

I liked all the stories. They are funny, heartbreaking, scary, hopeful, best of all, non-judgmental. Looking forward to reading Nimmo’s other titles.

 

*

Leny Strobel on Eileen R. Tabios

NVM Gonzalez, National Artist of the Philippines for Literature, once told me: Leny, for what you want to do, there is no language. Learn how to paint, dance, and sing instead!
This morning, I told myself: I can also praise those who can…!

So I am writing this in praise of The Balikbayan Artist (2024: Penguin Random House SEA), the second published novel of the poet/writer Eileen Tabios. The first novel, DoveLion (2021: AC Books), and this new novel echo a refrain of the author’s foray into the mythic realm of Kapwa — this cosmic worldview of Filipinos that is embedded in the materiality of its indigenous cultures even though seemingly overcome and subsumed under the perceived and assumed power of corrupt dictators and the minions of modern/colonial bureaucracies.

That’s more or less what I said in the blurb which ended up on the cover of the book: “The novel breaks out of the confines of the modern/colonial frame and returns us to the wondrous world of myth-making. This is how Story becomes Medicine.”

Eileen Tabios’ poetry, novels, essays, have been my companions on this Kapwa journey. The first essay I wrote about her poetry decades ago was about how she taught me how not to be afraid of Poetry. How not to be afraid.

[GO TO THIS LINK for more of Leny’s thoughts on The Balikbayan Artist]

 

 

 

SISA'S VENGEANCE: JOSE RIZAL'S SEXUAL POLITICS AND CULTURAL REVOLUTION by E. SAN JUAN, JR.

 FRANCIS C. MACANSANTOS Reviews

(an earlier edition; review is reprinted here as it's applicable to the current edition:)

Sisa's Vengeance: Jose Rizal's Sexual Politics and Cultural Revolution by E. San Juan, Jr.

(Vibal Foundation, 2021)

BOOK LINK

E. San Juan, Jr. was one illustrious young poet of the 1960s, showing mastery of the medium in both Filipino and English. He has since reinvented himself as a scholar of literature and culture in America where he is based. With a Ph.D. from Harvard and professorships emeritus from several universities in the U.S., he is deemed an intellect of the first rank in literary and philosophical circles. But just like Rizal, our first intellectual, San Juan is an exile, opting though to return to his country in the form of the books and articles he has written elsewhere, scholarly vessels that contain riches of insight on his motherland's history, culture, and politics. Some who admire his poetry would prefer verse, but from his published offerings it seems as though he has hung up his lyre.

In prose, however, the rapport he has kept up with his motherland has been fervidly dynamic. Freedom from post-colonial chains is the constant poem in this scholar's heart. He reminds us of that other illustrious viajero, the controversial novelist, Dr. Jose Rizal.

And it is obvious that like most Filipino intellectuals, San Juan can never drop the subject of Rizal or his continuing relevance to t he idea of liberation. What he does reject is the notion that we need to choose between Bonifacio and Rizal, one against and excluding the other. Indeed, he even sets aside discussion (postponed for another book perhaps?) on Rizal's refusal to join the revolution, preferring instead to emphasize the hero's achievement in conceptualizing an authentic ideological guide to freedom.

In Sisa's Vengeance, San Juan takes up and evaluates the views of practically all the major Rizal biographers and commentators, pointing out their shortcomings. He takes special exception to Under Three Flags by Benedict Anderson, whose assessment of Rizal lowers his stature as political thinker to that of a "mere moralist and novelist." On good authority (of Jim Richardson who exposes Anderson's numerous errors) he attacks Anderson's "ignorance" and lack of conceptual rigor.

But it is only towards the later chapters of Sisa's Vengeance that San Juan fully discloses his main theme (and topmost of his macho countrymen a startling one): that the proof of his authenticity as revolutionary is his principled belief in and his fervent advocacy of women's rights.

It comes to light in the book's latter chapters that for San Juan the cause of women's liberation is the sine qua non to any authentic movement for human liberation. An authentic vision of social change requires a profound understanding and staunch espousal of the cause for women's rights.

Media has tended to present Rizal as a fickle playboy with a girl in every port. Such popular representations flatter the self-image of Filipino machos. But San Juan's sensitively scrupulous view yields to us a ore respectful, even at times diffident, man involve--often a victim of heartbreak, all despite Maximo Viola's account of Rizal's presumed encounter with a Viennese woman of the streets. (Rizal, in fact, was actively involved in the rehabilitation of sex workers.)

Rizal idolized his mother who was an exceptionally gifted and cultured person, and he was made aware by his studies in London of Morga's Success, of the high social status of women of the Philippine islands before the Spanish conquest. It was in London in the midst of his research on Morga that he wrote--upon the request of M.H. del Pilar--his rightly famous letter (written in Tagalog) to the women of Malolos proclaiming their right to education and their duty to transmit their learning to their children.

Apart from these women, his mother, and those whom he was linked with amorously, Rizal had other--albeit imaginary--women: Maria Clara, Sisa, Juli, Dona Consolacion, Salome, and others--the women of his novels. Sisa, especially, is central to San Juan's meditation on Rizal's character, as it is she who embodies the victimization of women and of the motherland. After establishing the necessary link between the patriarchal system and all oppressive (because profit-oriented) systems, San Juan adroitly transforms Rizal's arguably feminist position into a fulcrum to elevate and authenticate his revolutionary status.

Indeed, San Juan's readings of Rizal's literary works recommend themselves directly to students and scholars of literature. Sisa's Vengeance provides a plethora of insights into Rizalian texts that are a fitting reward for any reader who has plowed through the rather difficult--often specialized--prose. Such oases, or epiphanies (pun intended) are surely traces of a poetic sensibility.

*****

Information about Francis C. Macansantos is available HERE. The bio below was what accompanied his review:

Francis C. Macansantos is a Baguio-based writer who writes poetry, essays and fiction in English and Chabacano, his native language. He is a Palanca award winner and an NCCA Writers Prize awardee. His latest book, Balsa: Poems Chabacano, was recently launched at Ateneo de Zamboanga, where he received the Most Outstanding Alumnus of the Year award in December 2011.