ARKIPELAGO PUBLISHING is proud to announce
the release of Gravities of Center by Barbara
Jane Reyes.
Contained in this collection are poems and
prose pieces which exhibit Barbara’s oftentimes eclectic
style / sensibilities and willingness to experiment with form
and language. With serious and playful poems very much rooted
in San Francisco Bay Area urban and suburban cultures, settings,
and vernaculars, a geographically faraway Philippines is never
absent from this Pilipina American writer’s consciousness.
Consistent throughout Gravities of Center are themes of
longing, desire, diaspora, postcoloniality, feminism, and coming
of age.
"...to experience Barbara's poems is to
learn about the specifics of a Pilipina's experience. And it
is also to experience the ‘universality’
of desire and loss — that is, despite the consistency of
losses, the stubbornness of never-ending desire ... by engaging
us all in the poetry of Desire, you need to be as present as
Barbara is in her poems. So enter these poems, and stay a while."
— Eileen Tabios, from her Preface to GRAVITIES
OF CENTER
"Intelligent, energetic,
and inventive, Reyes’s writing is nourished by the confluence
of cultures at which she resides as an urban twenty-first century
Pilipina American. Seen as both a post-colonial chronicle and
an intimate exploration of self, community, and history, Gravities
of Center hovers between conventional poetry or prose, bending
the genres until what emerges is a work that will illuminate
us like 'garnet crystalline fire…burning, to light the
way back home' ."
— Jaime Jacinto, author of HEAVEN IS JUST
ANOTHER COUNTRY
