BOOK REVIEW: FEAST

by Rose Cruz Churma

Feast is a collection of poetry by Ina Cariño and published in 2023 by Alice James Books of New Gloucester, Maine. This is fairly a slim publication at 76 pages in softcover.

Ina Cariño recently read her poetry in Honolulu at Ka Waiwai along University Avenue at an event organized by Jake Eduardo Vermaas of the Whitenoise Project and co-sponsored by other local groups.

The event titled “Absences and Ancestors—An Afternoon with Virginia Poet Laureate Emerita, Luisa A. Igloria, PhD” headlined the multi-awarded poet and professor Luisa A. Igloria, who is also Ina Cariño’s mother.

It was a rare occasion when both mother and daughter shared their poetry. I am more familiar with Luisa Igloria’s body of work, from the early days of her career while she still lived in the Philippines.

It was a pleasant surprise to hear her daughter recite her poems from her latest book, FEAST.

A former resident of Baguio City in the Philippines, Ina Cariño won the Whiting Award for poetry in 2022.

Her creative output has appeared in the American Poetry Review, the Margins, Guernica, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Magazine, the Paris Review Daily, Waxwing, New England Review, and elsewhere.

She was awarded a fellowship at Kundiman, a nonprofit organization dedicated to nurturing writers and readers of Asian American literature by creating spaces where Asian Americans can explore unique challenges that face those in the diaspora through their art. She also won the 2021 Alice James Award for Feast which was published in 2023.

In 2021, she received an MFA in creative writing from North Carolina University and was selected as one of four winners in the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest.

Before that, in 2019, Ina founded a poetry reading series called Indigena Collective, a reading series and platform for marginalized creatives.

Lena M. Turner of The Harvard Crimson observes that:

“Cariño’s collection adeptly grapples with the tensions of existing in the United States as an immigrant and a queer person alongside the beauty of Filipino culture and lineage. Their debut feels boldly autobiographical, and Feast does not hesitate to use the physical body as a canvas to explore these themes. […] There is no doubt that Ina Cariño is an important poet of our age, one who will not hesitate to share the stories they find in beautifully gripping detail.”

For example, in the first chapter of the book titled Takipsilim, the poem “Soiled” deftly describes the process of removing head lice or kuto:

“it is a collaborative effort, slow / hunt shared in swathes of sun / streaming past ikat curtains.”

It describes beautifully the device used in this exercise: “with scrimshaw handled comb, / double-sided butterfly, mama tends / to my hair—rakes fine toothed wood.”

In the third and last chapter named Balintataw, some passages made me pause. In Piyesta, she writes:

“surrendering to a new tongue / is having mine sliced / on the jag of expectation: / language cut on sweetened rim— / chipped teeth whitened. / but sugar burns bitter. I watch / my sentences crack candy glass / shattering on foreign floors.” 

It brings to mind questions directed at immigrant writers, “Why don’t you write in your own language?”

In the poem “I Dream in a Tongue Other Than My Own,” one senses an inner conflict that perhaps afflicts those who think and dream in one language but verbalize in another or whose art form uses a borrowed language.

Some passages grapple with this torment:

“…mouthing vowels so flat my mongrel self / sounds almost real / but I dream in a different dialect / sift my mother’s stout syllables / plump honorifics / from the language of my colonizers / who is left / glossy contractions / shiny / subjunctive / grammar that belongs / to the anthropology of the pale / people who look nothing like me…”

And ends with the cry:

“my tongue / is burning is / burning my tongue / is burning / is burning / is”

The poem “Hibiscus Dream No. 4” brings me back to my childhood in Baguio, when we would gather hibiscus buds we called gumamela and proceed to “pulp me / mash stamen / & pistil—petals deep red. / Then in a glass jar / slosh me with water / till i’m viscous, / juice turned thick.”

The concoction can now be used to make bubbles using leftover old plastic wands or “…twist a thin metal rod, / and coil it until a loop forms.”

I recall the fascination we had watching the bubbles form as we blew through the slime:

“…when the bubbles pop— / when the concrete stoop is soaked, / patterned with small wet circles— / will you search for me again / among verdant fronds?”With the frugality of words deftly positioned on the page, she brings back memories now forever etched in one’s consciousness.

This book has certainly met the terms of the publisher “to publish books that matter.”

As noted on the back page of the book, Alice James Books “seeks out poets whose writing possess the range, depth, and ability to cultivate empathy in our world and to dynamically push against silence.”

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ROSE CRUZ CHURMA established Kalamansi Books & Things three decades ago. It has evolved from a mail-order bookstore into an online advocacy with the intent of helping global Pinoys discover their heritage by promoting books of value from the Philippines and those written by Filipinos in the Diaspora. We can be reached at kalamansibooks@gmail.com.