Barbara Jane Reyes

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POETA EN SAN FRANCISCO
by Barbara Jane Reyes, 2005 $13
Design by Karen White and Colin Wilkinson

Barbara Jane Reyes’s Poeta en San Francisco is a linguistic tour de force, incorporating English, Spanish, and Tagalog in a book-length poem at once lush and experimentally rigorous. From the vantage of San Francisco, Reyes looks outward to the Philippines, Vietnam, and other colonized places with violent histories. As she said in a recent interview, “It’s almost a cliché, the phrase, ‘the personal is political,’ but certainly, this is a strong consideration in my work.” And yet, it is not only violence that concerns Reyes: “I am interested in how we come to love in this world, despite the historical circumstances, the conquests, the wars, which have created us as a diasporic people, as exiles, and refugees.” This is an ambitious, sweeping and necessary work. Reyes has won the James Laughlin Award for a second book from the Academy of American Poets for this volume. Barbara Jane Reyes was born in Manila, Philippines, and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her undergraduate education at UC Berkeley and her MFA at SF State University. Her work has recently been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her first book, Gravities of Center, was published by Arkipelago Books (SF, 2003).

To purchase, please go to http://www.tinfishpress.com/purchase.html

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Upcoming publication from Tinfish Press, POETA EN SAN FRANCISCO — the second book of poetry by Barbara Jane Reyes. More information on the new book will follow shortly.

"The US has been at war since its beginnings. And it has taken this to new levels in the last fifty or so years. In response, US poetry that matters has become one long, necessary lament. One could dismiss this as poets rhyming while Rome falls. But it makes more sense to see poetry as one of the places where the ravages of war—on the psyche, on the land, on the culture are called out and called into question. Barbara Jane Reyes's poeta en san francisco is a necessary part of this emerging tradition of poetry. This book looks at what wars in the Philippines, Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq have done to the home front, to the city streets. It is a multilingual litany that forcefully articulates what it means to be living as a woman in a nation of veterans, virgins, and dark angels." — Juliana Spahr, author of Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You

For more info on the publisher, please go to http://www.tinfishpress.com

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September 19, 2005

Barbara Jane Reyes Wins Academy of American Poets Prize for her upcoming second collection of poems, Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish Press)

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Arkipelago Books Publishing is proud to announce the release of GRAVITIES OF CENTER, a book of poems 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.

GRAVITIES OF CENTER is now available at Arkipelago Books. Click HERE for the contact information on purchasing the book.

"...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

"Always mindful of the terrible past that still haunts her native country today, Reyes writes with urgency, but her poems contain an anger quite tempered by maturity and dignity. That past also haunts her own personal life in America: her poetry offers an acute look of what new ethnic identity means, but again, without sanctimonious complaints. Even when she writes about that other terrible topic, love, she is devastating in conveying loss, but without reaching for sentimental sympathy. At once tender and tough, her precise voice shatters us." — Nguyen Qui Duc, Host/Producer, Pacific Time Public Radio

"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 conventionalpoetry 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

For more info, please go to http://www.arkipelagobooks.com