[Reyes] writes from an expansive, complex 'we' that pulls all the quiet daughters out from where they were hidden away. She writes in a new language for the daughters, the mothers, the workers, the immigrants, the monstrous, the bitches, the detained, the dead, the silenced: the women ... Language is fraught for Reyes, and her poetry crackles with her attempts at breaking out from the binds of colonialism, gender, and history ... Reyes’s language, bastardized by colonial violence, is also one that’s thriving and full of light.
Reyes uses incantatory language to speak to Filipina girls and women, and her words will resonate with many, many readers ... Individual poems apostrophize Filipinas like the murdered transgender Jennifer Laude. Infused with Spanish and Tagalog, Reyes's beautiful, angry verse shines throughout. For a wide range of readers.
The directness of many of the poems that follow feel to me very much in tune with the moment we’re living in, where women in particular, led by women of color, are responding to those people who looked at the election of Donald Trump as evidence that their time had returned, that the fact that the country elected a man who had bragged about sexually assaulting a woman meant it was open season on women everywhere, with middle fingers and public truth-telling and lawsuits ... I’ve also been long a fan of the way Reyes moves between languages without explanation or translation or even setting the non-English apart from the English via italics ... This book makes me work for it, which is what I want poetry to do.
... powerful ... Reyes fuses elegy, psalm, prayer, and the language of protest as a challenge to hegemonic, patriarchal, and colonialist narrative-making ... boldly exposes and documents violence against Pinay women while also embracing a liminal, transitory, trilingual identity ... a call to arms against oppressive languages, systems, and traditions.
