Mortal in Their Holdings: A Collection of Poems

Here is a slice out of a life: A Filipina American woman navigates love, future motherhood, an America that is getting harder to recognize, and the powers of family—both chosen and inherited. These poems take place across the globe and explore changing worlds and changing bodies with both searing clarity and a surreal abstraction. Using mainly free verse and rarely longer than a page, these compact poems attempt to justify the consequences of being human. Navigating the “headless orchestra” of undergoing a surgical abortion and the diabetes that plagues the author’s family as “clanking dishes on a hollow organ,” no clinical detail is spared in the verse of this nurse-turned-poet. Her language sings most when she is in love or in protest. The rally cry of this collection can be found in the wisdom passed through generations: “There is caribou taming and cannula placing and metaphor making to pass on.”