Title: The Beauty of Ghosts: Five Voices A Theater of Poetry

Author: Luis H. Francia

Description:

The Beauty of Ghost attempts to individualize the Filipino immigrant experience to the United States, and is made up of an idiosyncratic suite of poems the poet envisions as a theater of poetry. These works examine the immigrant's life as seen through the eyes of various individuals, ranging from a manong to a teenaged rapper, from a nurse to an aging Comfort Woman who has found refuge in Queens, New York. While by no means exhaustive of the U.S. immigrant experience, The Beauty of Ghosts renders that experience vivid, unsettling, and a counterpoint to the stereotypical representation of the American Dream. It had its world premiere in 2007, in New York, at Topaz Arts, a nonprofit performing arts organization in Woodside, Queens, which has a large Filipino community.