Poetry of family

It should be a turn-away crowd at Writers’ Bar in Raffles Hotel this Friday from 5 to 7 p.m. when homecoming poet Angela Narciso Torres reads her poetry and launches her book, Blood Orange, published in the US by Willow Books/Aquarius Press.

The Poetry Grand Prize Winner of the 2013 Willow Books Literature Awards, the collection has been described as “Part memoir, part love letter to the Philippines of her youth.”

Late last year, Philippine STAR poet/columnist Juaniyo Arcellana came up with the first local review, a glowing one. Here’s an excerpt:  

“… Torres launched her first book Blood Orange… late last September in Illinois, serving notice that Philippine poetry in English is not only alive and well in another tropic or hemisphere, but also beating with the heart of deep kinship. There is not a line here that doesn’t celebrate family, however indirectly, the primary unit of society that for the most part is front and center of her poetry.

“Divided into three sections of more or less equal number of poems, Blood Orange evokes memories of the homeland and traces an ancestry to suburban Metro Manila, from one who has since settled down on the opposite side of the world and several latitudes higher, starting her own family in the great American Midwest while letting the bloodlines become song lines that eventually bleed into verse.”

In the States, Fil-Am poet-professor Vince Gotera of University of Northern Iowa, also the editor of the prestigious North American Review, was among the first to issue praise for the debut collection:

“The title poem of Blood Orange… is one I distinctly remember publishing in the NAR, along with three others in the book. Such a distinct memory because Torres’s verse is so beautifully lyrical, so luscious with image, with color and aroma and other sensory stuff. ‘Blood Orange’ begins, ‘At the river’s edge — / strewn seed, vermilion / petals from blood oranges,’ and ends, ‘leaves exhale / the spice-heavy air, / the punishing sweet.’

“Here we experience sight, smell, taste, feel (exhale, heavy), and the internal comment (punish), all in under twenty words. This kind of sensuality and lushness appears throughout the book, not only for the sake of the exotic or for local color, but to anchor deep emotion: closenesses and separations in families then and now, sublime and lyrical beauty, religions and mythologies, environmental degradation and heartbreaking poverty, bittersweet memories, being a parent and being a child. An amazing debut. Get this book.”

Angela was born in Brooklyn and raised in Manila, specifically in San Juan, where most of her memories of childhood, adolescence and teenhood are rooted.

We first met over a decade ago when the Asia-Pacific Conference-Workshop on Contemporary and Indigenous Poetry organized by the Philippine Literary Arts Council (PLAC) had a reading session with foreign poets in Ateneo de Manila University, where she earned her first college degree.

She attended several more sessions of that As-Pac poetry fest, and subsequently showed up at the Mag:Net Katipunan poetry readings. I recall asking her for an essay for inclusion in a coffee-table book on San Juan, which she did submit along with vintage black-and-white photos of their old neighborhood. Unfortunately, that publication didn’t push through.

Next thing I knew, marriage had taken Angela back to the US, where her husband worked and where they raised their three sons. We corresponded by e-mail, so I was more or less kept abreast of Angela’s deepening involvement with poetry, which led to her own steady production as she also started attending workshops and gaining fellowships in poetry programs. Her early poems gained inclusion in a couple of thematic collections I had helped edit, anthologies of love poems and father poems published here.  

Now and then she’s do the balikbayan trail, and we’d wind up e-mailing one another on common friends she’d discovered during visits to Negros Oriental. One time when she was in Manila, I asked her to read her poetry and speak to my class in Ateneo, her own alma mater. 

Back in the USA, Angela became a graduate of Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She also received fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, Ragdale Foundation, and Midwest Writing Center. She currently resides in Chicago, where she teaches poetry workshops and serves as a senior poetry editor for Rhino.

For someone who might be said to be a late-bloomer, Angela has certainly blossomed with her poetry, which is why I expect quite an audience this Friday, June 27, for what Writers’ Bar bills as the latest edition of its Authors in Residence Series. (Last year it was Jessica Hagedorn who spoke on, read from, and launched Manila Noir, which she edited.)

You better come early, as Angela only managed to bring home a limited number of copies. The lovely book features richly detailed cover art by Hermes Alegre, whose painting caught Angela’s eye at a Saturday Group of Artists exhibit when she came home last year.

“The minute I saw the painting, I knew,” she says. “I had been searching quite a while for the right image to capture the spirit of (my poetry) collection. Now, I feel the pieces have fallen into place.”

Angela Narciso Torres’ recent work appears in Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, and Cream City Review. Meanwhile, Blood Orange continues to reap wide acclaim. 

“At once vividly present in the moment and fully attuned to the under-dwelling currents of history,” writes Daniel Tobin, author of five books of poetry including Belated Heavens, 2011 Massachusetts Book Award winner, “Torres’ poems affirm and achieve a hard-won continuity of feeling and insight. (These) poems move with the fluid assurance of a dancer, and sing with enviable lyric grace.”

C. Dale Young, poetry editor of New England Review and author of Torn and The Second Person, weighs in: “Because paying attention is a form of prayer, Angela Narciso Torres’s poems pay deep and close attention. The details of these poems are stitched together with great care, and what we get is not just the landscape of memory but also the landscape of family, which in the end is the god we really pray to when we are restless. These are beautiful and beautifully made poems.”

Matthew Olzmann, author of Mezzanines, winner of the 2011 Kundiman Poetry Prize, writes: “There’s something lush and holy in these poems that slip between generations, between daughterhood and motherhood. Blood Orange elegantly charts the mysteries of family and place, time and its uncertainties, with a keen vision that is at once sensual, entrancing and deeply felt. Line by careful line, Angela Narciso Torres brings forward an enchanting poetry, with ‘two fingers on the pulse like the true point / of a divining rod,’ always ready to lead us to water or love — the currents that shimmer beneath this book’s rich surfaces.”

There are many more rave reviews that you may check out at Angela’s website. Her first book clearly marks her out to be much more than just a promising poet. Indeed, she is already one of significant accomplishment. And we are lucky to have her back with us for a spell, as her schedule is heavy with readings.

Only a fortnight ago, she participated in the Reading for Brooksday@PrintersRow Lit Fest in Chicago that celebrated the work of Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks.

On July 10, she joins Rhino contributors (including our very own Marianne Villanueva) for the Rhino Poetry @Why There Are Words Reading Series at Studio 333 on Caledonia Street in Sausalito, CA. On July 19, she reads with Sarah Carson and Steve Halle at Buckham Gallery in Flint, Michigan, and on the following day, at Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor. On Aug. 11, Angela Narciso Torres will be the featured reader at Molly Malone’s on 7652 Madison, Forest Park, Illinois.

Here’s sharing one poem in full from Blood Orange, titled “To Return to San Juan”:

“What ocean liner, which bus station/ to the loam that bore the imprint/ of my first patent leather shoes. How far/ to the cogon grass that watched my shadow/ lengthen to the frayed edges of day./ To know the gaggle of children/ stoning mangoes on Pilar Street. To feel/ the white heat of hand rhymes,/ mayflies, a piano scale spiraling from a small window./ To enter the tile-roofed house, eyes smarting/ from the sputter of onions in a blackened pot./ Awakened by rain on low eaves, to inhale/ steaming pan de sal, the grainy crust soaked/ in coffee —dark, smooth, then bitter/ like a refrain one tries to forget. To hear/ the soft slap of hemp slippers on stone/ when evenings brought the smoke/ of burning leaves.//

“There was always too much/ to remember of San Juan — summer, a river,/ stories the women sang. A shaft of light/ igniting Tita Pacita’s rooms at dusk./ The night Benny shot the Dizons’ dog/ with his BB gun, as it stretched on the carport/ scratching fleas, only the tadpoles saw,/ and none but stag beetles heard. And the bells/ of Mary the Queen still pealed mornings/ at seven, like the frogs returning after rain,/ croaking their devotions to jasmine stars.”