Up Jump the Boogie

Barbara Jane Reyes muses on aesthetics, community, and hip hop in John Murillo's new book:

As you can tell, I really like what he has to say; in many ways, his discussion of these is resonant and affirming for my own feelings of being somewhere between poetic worlds and hip grassroots community spaces. I’ve been realizing again and again how I could never be what the local grassroots Filipino American community wants in a poet. I am too female and middle class; I am too “literary” with my emphasis on page, publication, book, revision, and withstanding editorial rigor. So this is where I come from. Thinking also about Miguel Syjuco’s recent discussion at Book Passage regarding our Filipino hang-up about authenticity, I just don’t cut it. So this is where I come from, as I constantly search for literary awesome people of color who value the same things I do — rigor, publication, poetry that engages our world. I know; I am talking about me and not Murillo. I do want to say that I think effective literature does this, make us think about ourselves and our world . . .