God's Will for Monsters

pick

Painful, good, short book of poetry with some formal gestures - the pantoum “How to Pray,” in particular, is a fantastic and gorgeously unexpected. (A pantoum, the French/English version of the Malayan pantun berkait, according to Wikipedia 😉, takes the second and fourth line of a quatrain and repeats them as the first and third lines of the next stanza.) The entire book reminded me of Sofia Samatar‘s “Ogres of East Africa” - taking ... ⬇️⬇️

suzisteffen ... colonial gaze and even actual colonial myths and suppositions and repositioning them from the point of view of the colonized. Here‘s “Ogres” - https://uncannymagazine.com/article/ogres-east-africa/ 6y

suzisteffen In this book, the repositioning is complicated by the Catholicism that the colonized also took on, fully, more fully perhaps than the colonizers. And of course there‘s also *pans camera around dramatically* all of US history of racism and white power over Filipinx folks, not to mention sexism. “What We Learned from K., 1997,” is superb about the latter. 6y

suzisteffen #AsianAmericanPacificIslanderHeritageMonth #poetry 6y

12 likes3 comments

suzisteffen

God's Will for Monsters | Rachelle Cruz

Calling All
Aswangs of the World!?!

hey, we‘ve written you twice. are you somewhere chewing strawberry
gummies underneath the hem of some mothers cotton dress? yeah, us
too. it‘s like camping in the attic with the humidifier on full blast. it‘s
also kind of like threading hair from a brush into a friendship bracelet,
picking lint from the teeth. is that creepy? yeah. remember that time
you webbed your hand through our hair & the lake was full

suzisteffen of twisted hangers? how every fish was a gift, you said, its guts thick as nutella. 6y

suzisteffen #poetry 6y

13 likes2 comments