de la Paz employs language both soft-spoken and surprising to elevate the sonnet in his sixth collection of poems . . . An accomplished mid-career poet, de la Paz joins the likes of Diane Seuss and Laurie Ann Guerrero in pushing the sonnet's form into brilliant new shapes for today's readers.--Diego Báez "Booklist"
One of Oliver de la Paz's gifts is his sense of the book as a whole. In his latest, he turns the sonnet into a lens for slow-motion snapshots of migration . . . Amidst poems rich in details of the resulting changing natural landscapes emerge vivid portraits: we see the father in his twenties holding a hatbox, later, a gun . . . Every "Diaspora Sonnet" holds this label as part of its title, the pointed repetition pounding impactfully, each section bookended by a "Chain Migration" ballad and a punctuating final pantoum, a reminder of these poems' origins.--Rebecca Morgan Frank "Literary Hub"
Here the sonnet takes on de la Paz's narrative and lyric search for home, for what home means, and how we sing about it when it has been taken away. This is a song everyone needs to hear.--Matthew Dickman, author of Husbandry
Poems rise off the page and into the reader's lungs, blood stream, and heart while reading Oliver de la Paz's The Diaspora Sonnets. . . . De la Paz moves within the tradition of elegant rhymes, pacing, and the fourteen-line convention. But he also veers off, as when the theme of love for family members joins displacement, memory accompanies privation. There is ache. And, above all, a brilliant tenderness.--Kimiko Hahn, author of Foreign Bodies
The thoughtful latest from de la Paz . . . explores his family's experience of the Filipino diaspora . . . The struggle to create a home in exile is vividly rendered in poems that trace the family's journeys over the decades: 'We wanted to construct a livable world/ but the pieces didn't fit.' This haunting collection sheds new light on the migrant's experience of loss and longing.-- "Publishers Weekly"
There is no container more fitting to the conveyance of the nuanced sorrow of the permanent displacement from home, a word 'ensnared with thorns, ' than the sonnet, certainly as it is practiced by Oliver de la Paz, in metrical couplets, with shimmering music, 'the syllables of story, // saying then, then, then, ' and a splendorous catalog of details, acutely remembered, and gilded into metaphor. ...The tenderness in these poems comes through in their 'gradations of memory where one // belonged, ' and in their penetrating artfulness, itself a kind of love.--Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets
While the sonnet's traditional boundaries lend some compression to the unruliness of memory and imagination, Oliver de la Paz's lyric images slip, dart, and soar far beyond the form's constraints. The Diaspora Sonnets achieves a poetry of stunning dialectical energy--solemn, broken, playful, prayerful, and deeply personal.--Patrick Rosal, author of The Last Thing