Kaluluwa: New and Selected Poems by J. Neil C. Garcia

"Death is the muse of these new poems. Written in a period of grace illness, 'Kaluluwa' turns the tables on traditional disquisitions on the subject: the speaker of these mournful meditations, these terse and urgent lyrics is the self-as-body, mortally aggrieved, for a restitution of its fragile claims on life, for a kind of resurrection. What may be said to distinguish 'Kaluluwa' is its attempt to interweave metaphysical and animist accounts of spirituality, wagering everything on the necessary unity of all corporeal knowledge, all embodied imaginings of the soul. Variants of the story of a garden, where a god and his creations suffer the pangs and reversals of love, may be found in many oral literatures of the world, and indeed this story is at the heart of this poem-cycle as well. In the end, the poems in this collection demonstrate how, despite their indulgence in things bleak and unavailing, a bright seething, an ardor and love for life and its ongoingness, can and do manage to whisper past the tempest of the here-and-now deep into memory's transfiguring calm, our luminous hereafter." (Publisher's notes)

This book is a Philippine import. Author's other books include Closet Quivers (1992); Our Lady of the Carnival (1996); Closet Queeries (1997); Slip/pages (1998); The Sorrows of Water (2000). His ground-breaking study 'Philippine Gay Culture: The Last 30 Years' won the National Book Award, 1996 given by the Manila Critics Circle. He also co-edited 'Ladlad', the definitive anthology-series of Philippine gay writing.

Paperback: 320 pages
Publisher: University of Santo Tomas Pub. House (2001)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 971506149-4
ISBN-13: 978-97-1-506149-0