Tula: Poems

ISBN-13: 9781571314888 / Angielski / Miękka / 2016 / 96 str.

A. Van Jordan

Opis

Tula a ruined Toltec capital; a Russian city known for its accordions; Tagalog for poem.
Prismatic, startling, rich with meaning yet sparely composed, Chris Santiago s debut collection of poems begins with one word and transforms it, in a dazzling sleight of hand, into a multivalent symbol for the immigrant experience.Tula Santiago reveals to readers a distant land devastated by war.Tula its music beckons in rhythms, time signatures, and lullabies. Tula can the poem, he seems to ask, build an imaginative bridge back to a family lost to geography, history, and a forgotten language?
Inspired by the experiences of the blood stranger the second-generation immigrant who does not fully acquire the language of his parentsTula paints the portrait of a mythic homeland that is part ghostly underworld, part unknowable paradise. Language splinters. Impossible islands form an archipelago across its landscape. A mother sings lullabies and a father works the graveyard shift in St. Paulwhile in the Philippines, two dissident uncles and a grandfather send messages and telegrams from the afterlife.
Deeply ambitious, a collection that examines the shortcomings and possibilities of both language and poetry themselves, Tula announces the arrival of a major new literary talent.
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