Description
2018 California Book Award Finalist
Feminist experimental poetry in the tradition of Audre Lorde and Theresa Kyung Cha from a prominent Filipina American poet.
"Reyes writes with conviction about the various ways imperialism transforms women into 'capital, collateral, damaged soul.' However, the women that appear throughout the book are not merely victims; in Reyes's radical cosmology, these women-these daughters--are rebels, saints, revolutionaries, and torchbearers, 'sharp-tongued, willful.' This book is a call to arms against oppressive languages, systems, and traditions."--Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Infused with Spanish and Tagalog, Reyes's beautiful, angry verse shines throughout. For a wide range of readers."--Library Journal, starred review
"I cannot shout 'brilliant' loud enough. Start to this finish, Invocation to Daughters is truth. 'I am not your ethnic spectacle. I am not your cultural poverty. You / don't get to frame me.' This is a book you read and teach and live."--Anthony Cody, author of Borderland Apocrypha
Invocation to Daughters is a book of prayers, psalms, and odes for Filipina girls and women trying to survive and make sense of their own situations. Writing in an English inflected with Tagalog and Spanish, in meditations on the relationship between fathers and daughters and impassioned pleas on behalf of victims of brutality, Barbara Jane Reyes unleashes the colonized tongue in a lyrical feminist broadside written from a place of shared humanity.
Praise for Invocation to Daughters:
"Against violence against women, Barbara Jane Reyes rips and runs, jumping off Audre Lorde's 'the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house, ' Invocation to Daughters recombines registers--prayers, pleas and elegy--braiding a trilingual triple-threat, a 3-pronged poetics that enjambs and reconfigures the formal with the street, utterance with erasure, the prose sentence with the liminal. Invocation to Daughters reminds me of the 70's in the East Bay, when Jessica Hagedorn met Ntozake Shange and ignited a green flash seen from horizon to horizon. Barbara Jane Reyes is one of the Bay Area's incendiary voices."--Sesshu Foster, author of ELADATL
"Invocation to Daughters is a space for multitudes, a hypnotic collection that draws from family history--particularly the complex cultural gendered dynamic between father and daughter--in order to create a manual for emancipation from the interior and exterior binds that keep us from ourselves. Through prayers, calls to actions, and testimonies, Reyes invents 'a language so that we know ourselves, so that we may sing, and tell, and pray.'"--Carmen Giméeacute;nez Smith, author of Be Recorder and Cruel Futures
Product Details
| Publisher | City Lights Books |
| Publish Date | October 31, 2017 |
| Pages | 96 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9780872867475 |
| Dimensions | 6.8 X 5.4 X 0.4 inches | 0.3 pounds |
About the Author
An Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow, she received her B.A. in Ethnic Studies at U.C. Berkeley and her M.F.A. at San Francisco State University. She is an adjunct professor at University of San Francisco's Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program. She has also taught in the Asian American Studies Department at San Francisco State University, and in Creative Writing and English at Mills College. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for Philippine American Writers and Artists (PAWA). She lives with her husband, poet Oscar Bermeo, in Oakland, where she is co-editor of Doveglion Press.
Reviews
"'I am not your ethnic spectacle, ' declares Reyes in her powerful fifth collection. 'I write whether or not you invite my words.' Reyes fuses elegy, psalm, prayer, and the language of protest as a challenge to hegemonic, patriarchal, and colonialist narrative-making. Moving among English, Spanish, and Tagalog, Reyes chronicles the ways legal and judicial systems fail to protect Filipina women such as Mary Jane Veloso, who sits on death row in Indonesia, and Jennifer Laude, a trans woman murdered by a U.S. Marine stationed in the Philippines. She boldly exposes and documents violence against Pinay women while also embracing a liminal, transitory, trilingual identity: 'This lyric-making me, now a dazzling we.' Reyes writes with conviction about the various ways imperialism transforms women into 'capital, collateral, damaged soul.' However, the women that appear throughout the book are not merely victims; in Reyes's radical cosmology, these women-these daughters--are rebels, saints, revolutionaries, and torchbearers, 'sharp-tongued, willful.' This book is a call to arms against oppressive languages, systems, and traditions, all that 'strips us of our kick and grit.' In choosing to be ethical, and by refusing to submit to oppression, Reyes writes, 'We rise/ And in writing, we restore our lives.'"--Publishers Weekly, starred review
"San Francisco-based, James Laughlin Award-winning poet Reyes uses incantatory language to speak to Filipina girls and women, and her words will resonate with many, many readers. 'Daughters, our world is beyond unkind' opens an early poem; the collection as a whole then details the arduous female condition ('We are fed up being groped, being entered, being punished, being/ trashed. We are nobody's fucking things'), then strikes back sharply ('Why does my outrage inconvenience you?'), and advises ('let us create a language so that we know ourselves'). Individual poems apostrophize Filipinas like the murdered transgender Jennifer Laude. Infused with Spanish and Tagalog, Reyes's beautiful, angry verse shines throughout. For a wide range of readers."--Library Journal, starred review
"Language is fraught for Reyes, and her poetry crackles with her attempts at breaking out from the binds of colonialism, gender, and history. ... The language Reyes creates is one that brings together anti-colonial and anti-capitalist feminist thought and Catholic forms. There are psalms, prayers, and gospels written to and for Filipino women."--Ploughshares
"I feel like Reyes has found yet another gear in Invocation to Daughters. While it is still built on that same tension, where the beauty of expression crashes against the brutality of the world as it is (especially for women, especially for people of color) I find it here integrated and crystallized so deeply it awes me. Maybe I'm only noticing her maturity in a way, but it's sure not maturity in the sense of softness or acceptance: these poems are fire. Eternal fire, really, but also a highly specific and located fire: these are Filipino poems, periodically breaking into Tagalog, into Spanish, very much located in San Francisco, and very much everywhere too. It's a mystery to me how they can be so universal yet so immediately topical--so much so it seems impossible they were written before all the #metoo headlines, but that just shows again how sexual harassment and police shootings and grief and anger sure didn't start this month. Or as Reyes puts it: 'You walk hand-in-hand with your damage, into the world.' She also writes 'Fuck your fences and your applause' but I'm going to applaud anyway--this book is the news for real."--Small Press Distribution
"The directness of these [poems] feel to me very much in tune with the moment we're living in, where women in particular, le
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