Tula

“In a hypnotic blend of languages and lands, Tula captures the voice of a world we are happy to inhabit. The lines are taut and spare; the scope is intimate and communal. What surprises me most is the ability to move seamlessly between the exterior world to the depths of the interiority of these speakers. Reading these poems feels as if ‘A door opens and your name / is called & all at once you aren’t cut off / from the rest of the world anymore: you are / the rest of the world.’”

“Chris Santiago’s poems encourage us to see English the way an immigrant does—as something different, to be broken and remade. Through this difference in language, Santiago makes readers aware of both the poet’s otherness and their own. This is a book that both transports us and transforms us.”

“Mesmerizing … Chris Santiago seems to recognize that words will always hold power, even as their meanings evolve. Through everything, Tula delves into these nuances of language: how it is suppressed, how it is weaponized, how it loves, how it informs, and how it is often as fleeting as a birdsong. Tula is therefore a celebration of the ephemeral and the permanent, a lovely testament to the beauty of contradiction.”

“This haunted (and deeply haunting) collection makes us aware of the spectral legions who might otherwise be lost to historical feeling in our time. Interweaving personal reflections with diasporic etymologies, a fractured family history, and close ecological observation, Tula discloses the many ways that our nation’s incursions into the Pacific Rim region may contribute to the political unconscious of contemporary American poetry.”

“The mysteries of language, the vagaries of sound and syntax, the reverberations of alternate meanings as words flood the ear: these are the subject of Chris Santiago’s gorgeous debut collection. ‘It was homegrown and inequitable’: this poet’s imagination, testing at every moment the relationship of his American present to his Filipino family’s past, creates a rich complex of memory and desire. Santiago’s verbal magic is as explosive as his verse forms are carefully restrained.”

“In Tula—the word for poem in Tagalog—Chris Santiago pursues the language and experience of the immigrant, engaged with dreams, wonder, oppression, and heartbreak. Exquisitely lyric, fierce and delicate, the poems often are fractured in form and charged with suffering. Whether set in Manila, Japan, or Minnesota, these poems, lit with imagination, reveal what poetry can be in life and the sweet and searing moments of life itself.”

“One of the fiercest voices I’ve come to love these days … Santiago’s heritage threads through the Philippines, and in his hands this homeland itself is mined for metaphor: the colonized archipelago is fragmented, misremembered, and fleetingly recaptured Santiago’s string of poems. This book is dazzling.”