Details

ISBN-10: 1934414379
ISBN-13: 9781934414378
Publisher: BOA Editions
Publish Date: 08/31/2010
Dimensions: 8.80" L, 5.90" W, 0.30" H

Diwata

Paperback

Price: $17.00

Overview

James Laughlin Award-winning Filipina poet Barbara J. Reyes invents new mythologies melding Southeast Asian traditions with streetwise West Coast poetry.

  • Barbara Jane Reyes was born in Manila, Philippines, raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is also the author of Gravities of Center (Arkipelago Books, 2003), Poeta en San Francisco (TinFish Press, 2005), Diwata (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2010), To Love as Aswang (Philippine American Writers and Artists, Inc., 2015), and Invocation to Daughters (City Lights Publishing, 2017). Her newest book of poems is Letters to a Young Brown Girl (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2020).

    She is also the author of three chapbooks, For the City That Nearly Broke Me (Aztlan Libre Press, 2012), Cherry (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2007), and Easter Sunday (Ypolita Press, 2007).

    Her seventh book, Wanna Peek Into My Notebook?: Notes on Pinay Liminality is forthcoming from Paloma Press in 2022.

    She received her BA in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, her MFA at San Francisco State University, and she teaches in the Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program at University of San Francisco. She lives with her husband, poet and educator Oscar Bermeo, in Oakland.

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Reviews

"We are offered Reyes' own version of oral history, the history of her split heritage, the story of survival, and myths of Reyes' own creation that add an additional emtional truth despite their deliberate inaccuracy. We leave this book both shellshocked and empowered, reborn and rib-torn."
Coal Hill Review

"These retellings of myths and folk tales become a modality through which ahistory is rendered into history, history itself is investigated, and variations of diwatas, their quarries, and their hunters are revealed as inhabiting multiple narrative, linguistic, and cultural sites."
Lantern Review

"Triumphant and plaintive, Diwata is a living document, offering both succor and claws."
Rain Taxi

"Myth and story, telling and retelling, the claiming of an indigenous history and also a dislocation from that history form a thematic crux in this gorgeous text..."
American Poet

More Reviews

Details

ISBN-10: 1934414379
ISBN-13: 9781934414378
Publisher: BOA Editions
Publish Date: 08/31/2010
Dimensions: 8.80" L, 5.90" W, 0.30" H
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