The writing and art are interwoven with themes that range from childhood, family and home, to investigations of the body and the mind. These works resonate with truth, no matter how inexact, magnified and misshapen by memory, fear, love.

Writings by Arlene Ang, Barbara Jane Bermeo, Joseph O. Legaspi, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz and Joel Toledo reveal the ambiguous heart of family and home. Arlene Ang’s poems conjure a special kind of happiness, shadowed by aw, even as Jill Chan’s haunting series of poems, ‘Antecedent’, ‘Diver’ and ‘Reason’, appear like messages, floating upward from underneath a great body of water. Joseph O. Legaspi’s poems include ‘Imago’, about a mysterious and significant rite of passage, ‘The Bringers of Bread’ and ‘Poem for my Navel’, with its calm meditation on personal origin. His work shares common ground with Barbara Jane Bermeo’s prose poems and their careful and layered consideration of legacy and lineage. Rochita Loenen-Ruiz’s ‘Missing Home’ recounts a son’s confusion over what home means to him, confusion that is echoed in Joel Toledo’s poem about a child’s perplexity in the face of death.

There are also investigations into how politics and history affects that element of the self that comprises Auto/Biography. Included in this edition is the work of Linh Dinh, whose writing elicits such complex emotions: anger, curiousity, shock and pleasure, to name a few, while his images will have you gazing at them over and over again. Lino Dizon’s essay, ‘Fiestang Balen: Biography of a Town Fiesta’, recreates a lost place and time in the Philippines, serving up a tasty dish of official records, local history and scandal. Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor’s poems reveal how old and new worlds try to coexist in the space of two cultures. Grace Monte de Ramos’ poems include ‘Brave Woman’, which was featured in the anthology, Poets Against the War. Its themes find a complement in Eileen R. Tabios’s prose & list poems, ‘Overseas Filipino Worker’, ‘Ground Meat’ and ‘Blue Trunk’.

There are stories embedded in any life, something writers and artists have sought to excavate, like broken artefacts from deep in the earth’s subconscious layers, fragments that become all the more valuable for being broken yet preserved through time. Pick up these fragments and one can see something that memory cannot always preserve, but art can. Vita brevis, ars longa: life is brief, art endures.

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Ivy Alvarez is the author of Mortal (Washington, DC: Red Morning Press, 2006). Website: http://www.ivyalvarez.com