AbstractsLanguage, Literature & Linguistics

M.A. University of Hawaii at Manoa 2013. I came to writing poetry via non-fiction and short story. I turned to poetry, playing with line and breath, mixing imagination with possibility. After writing several poems, I was able to write the story in a news format to my satisfaction. I had found a way to get the news from poems. I continued to sustain my need for poetry as a secret endeavor because I deemed my poems 'too ethnic' or 'not complex enough' or 'not pretty enough.' I had never read any Filipino poets; thus, had no role models to compare how they treated 'ethnic' content. But non-fiction was my home base. I was attracted to its form as a type of testimony. This nurtured my affinity for writing poetry of witness and protest poems. A second entrance I found into poetry comes by way of the short story. Because I was born into generations of storytellers, loud women who dramatizedtheir lives with voice and gesture and ingrained in me a strong connection to family and community,I would enteftain myself by committing their textured voices and quirky mannerisms to the page. My first published creative piece was a short story. I am still drawn to the power of a storyline and the beauty of sentences. I believe this grounding in fiction led to my propensity for writing narrative poetry. This poetry collection reflects those journeys to community and self within a social and political framework. It is an act of finding important news and significant truths in the lives of women who are at home in real or imagined communities. The work navigates place as a physical and psychic state and explores the lyrical notions of body and time.