Advance Praise
“In barangay, Adrian De Leon traverses continents and oceans and various histories of struggle and forced movement and he does so with immense wisdom and poise. His poetic sensibilities are global and critical and geographical, and so the book amounts to a wondrous feat of both imagination and political solidarity.” – Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of A History of My Brief Body and winner of the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize
“This is a book where urgent questions live – and keep living, despite the ‘answers’ typically imposed on such questioning. Here is poetry that examines and sings of Filipino diaspora while refusing white supremacist empire and a reductive representational politics. Here is a poet who takes no word, no sound for granted; each carries history, kinship, future, loss, ‘a wayward library’ of new maps and the un-mappable.” – Chen Chen, author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities
“barangay: an offshore poem by Adrian De Leon is a haunting and lilting elegy in fragments. Like Nathaniel Mackey’s Andoumboulou poems, these poems collect to a voyage song where migrants of the Philippines never land, never find peace; they are both survivors and ghosts drowned out by the victors of colony; they are ancient mariners who sing their wake in a constellation of broken languages that are lost and adopted; De Leon has turned these once marooned speech acts into poetry that is indelible and subversive and gorgeous.” – Cathy Park Hong, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
"This unforgettable collection journeys into the tributaries and offshore currents of Filipino history, culture and migration. Through multilingual and innovative poetic methods, Adrian De Leon traverses intergenerational, diasporic, archipelagic and transoceanic spaces. Be prepared, reader, to navigate the deepest routes and roots of memory and legend.” – Craig Santos Perez, author of Habitat Threshold and winner of the 2015 American Book Award
