As beautiful and varied as an archipelago, barangay is an elegant new collection of poetry from Adrian De Leon that gathers in and arranges the difficult pieces of a scattered history. While mourning the loss of his grandmother who "lived, loved and grieved in three languages," De Leon skips his barangay, which is both a boat and an administrative unit in the Philippine government, over the history of both his family and a nation. In these poems De Leon considers the deadly impact of colonialism, the far-reaching effects of the diaspora from the Philippines and the personal loss of his ability…
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As beautiful and varied as an archipelago, barangay is an elegant new collection of poetry from Adrian De Leon that gathers in and arranges the difficult pieces of a scattered history. While mourning the loss of his grandmother who "lived, loved and grieved in three languages," De Leon skips his barangay, which is both a boat and an administrative unit in the Philippine government, over the history of both his family and a nation. In these poems De Leon considers the deadly impact of colonialism, the far-reaching effects of the diaspora from the Philippines and the personal loss of his ability to speak Ilokano, his grandmother's native tongue. These are spare, haunting poems, which wash over the reader like the waves of the ocean the barangays navigated long ago and then pull the reader into their current like the rivers De Leon left behind.
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
Excerpt
Click here to read an excerpt of barangay.
