Thank you so much for this review. This book has been tremendously influential to me also; I love Cariaga’s wild use of formal and spatial technique, which I see as an attempt to liberate language and poetic form from its received (and perhaps imperial?) uses. The “His Civil Rights” poem and “The Family Tree” are particularly powerful examples of this.

Also I love the other poems that start with “no”: “No Boat,” “No Stone,” “No Moon,” and especially “No Orient.”

And yes I too very much look forward to new work and a new book from Catalina Cariaga!

Kazim Ali
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Henriette:

How is posting with a pseudonym any different that posting anonymously? Don’t you think that anyone here reads other blogs? Yes, indeed, the mind reels.
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“They claimed that Elizalde had pressured them into posing as one. ‘We didnt live in caves, only near them, until we met Elizalde,’ they said. ‘Elizalde forced us to live in the caves so that we’d be better cavemen. Before he came, we lived in huts on the other side of the mountain and we farmed. We took off our clothes because Elizalde told us to do so and promised if we looked poor that we would get assistance. He gave us money to pose as Tasaday and promised us security from counter-insurgency and tribal fighting.’

Iten’s discovery sent shockwaves around the world — a fake stone-age tribe managed to surprise even the most jaded newspaper readers — and soon reporters were once again making the journey out into the Filipino rain forest to visit the Tasaday.”

What a great subject for poetry! And refreshing in light of the recent terrible name-calling over Kent Johnson’s Yasuada poems and the trouble had with certain anonymous commenters here and elsewhere. The mind reels!

Bravo, Barbara!
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do you know when her next book is coming out?

c
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