In his prize-winning poetry collection Reliquaria, R. A. Villanueva embraces liminal, in-between spaces in considering an ever-evolving Filipino American identity. Languages and cultures collide; mythologies and faiths echo and resound. Part haunting, part prayer, part prophecy, these poems resonate with the voices of the dead and those who remember them. In this remarkable book, we enter the vessel of memory, the vessel of the body. The dead act as witness, the living as chimera, and we learn that whatever the state of the body, this much rings true: every ode is an elegy; each elegy is always an ode.

Acknowledgments

Sacrum

1

Swarm

Life Drawing

These Bodies Lacking Parts

Telemachy

Like when passing graveyards

Fish Heads

In Memory of Xiong Huang

Aftermaths

God Particles

2

All Souls’ Day

Despedida

Sacramental

Socorro

Blessing the Animals

Confluences

Traps

On Transfiguration

Divination

3

Antipodal

In the dead of winter we

Ballast

As the river crests, mud-rich with forgotten things

Drifting toward the bottom, Jacques Piccard recalls the sky

Corpus

Vanitas

What the bones tell us

Iconoclasts

Invocation

1. Davenport, Iowa

2. Holofernes, to Judith at the strike

3. Medusa, at first sight of her face

4. On the sixth day, Ugolino thinks of his children

5. Isaac speaks of fingers

6. Feast of Three Kings, Jersey City

After this, Loving Kindness and Asanga flew

Mine will be a beautiful service

Notes

R. A. Villanueva was born in New Jersey and lives in Brooklyn. His honors include the 2013 Ninth Letter Literary Award for poetry and fellowships from Kundiman and the Asian American Literary Review. His writing has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, AGNI, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. A founding editor of Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art, he teaches at New York University.