Tula

Poems

Chris Santiago

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781571314888
• eBook ISBN:
  9781571319548
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

A debut poetry collection exploring themes of family and identity while examining the experiences of a second-generation Filipino immigrant in America.
Tula: a ruined Toltec capital; a Russian city known for its accordions; Tagalog for "poem."
Prismatic, startling, rich with meaning yet sparely composed, Chris Santiago's debut collection of poems—selected by A. Van Jordan as the winner of the 2016 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry—begins with one word and transforms it, in a dazzling sleight of hand, into a multivalent symbol for the immigrant experience. Tula: Santiago reveals to readers a distant land devastated by war. Tula: its music beckons in rhythms, time signatures, and lullabies. Tula: can the poem, he seems to ask, build an imaginative bridge back to a family lost to geography, history, and a forgotten language?
Inspired by the experiences of the second-generation immigrant who does not fully acquire the language of his parents, Tula paints the portrait of a mythic homeland that is part ghostly underworld, part unknowable paradise. Language splinters. Impossible islands form an archipelago across its landscape. A mother sings lullabies and a father works the graveyard shift in Saint Paul—while in the Philippines, two dissident uncles and a grandfather send messages and telegrams from the afterlife.
Deeply ambitious, a collection that examines the shortcomings and possibilities of both language and poetry themselves, Tula introduces a major new literary talent.
Praise for Tula
"A book that both transports us and transforms us." —Viet Thanh Nguyen
"A debut collection that is a spare, elegant engagement with language. . . . Santiago's struggles with identity are well-explored, but his linguistic savvy and precision truly stand out." — Publishers Weekly
"Santiago seems to recognize that words will always hold power, even as their meanings evolve. Through everything, Tula delves into these nuances of language: how it is suppressed, how it is weaponized, how it loves, how it informs, and how it is often as fleeting as a birdsong. Tula is therefore a celebration of the ephemeral and the permanent, a lovely testament to the beauty of contradiction." — Chicago Review of Books

Photograph: Loggers at Kuala Tahan

To be burned together into wet cells is something not to be taken lightly;

+

only after I swear to send copies do they agree to have it taken.

+

Lank & boot cut, they smoldered against the treeline.

For a living

they laid low the mysteries

for which we’d made our pilgrimage.

+

Kuala they said meant confluence.

We drank to it

first emptying our backpackers’ bottle

then something sweet & secret

of theirs—

+

soon, we understood each other

or thought so:

dark & large-eyed

quick to befriend or fight.

+

We were kinsmen,

cousins, brothers, split

by lapse & current & soon

to part ways again—for Sarawak.

For home.

For false starts & failed relations. Days

lashed to this one

only through trade & tariff.

+

And rain—

tail-lit, unseasonal; drumming

the cinder blocks of the pharmacy.

We’ve come out

cat-eyed & liquor-bright, crowded

together against a void.

+

The lab tech, a Fijian doubling

as cashier, understands something

of their dubiousness

or else it’s the intensity of their wish to have

in hand

this veranda, this

not being alone, although he loads

only paper

& doesn’t bother to make the room

+

dark. Out on the broad lot, even rainwater is refused.

Out on the broad lot, it pools thick as palm oil.

+

Soon they’ll fire him

for grinning too sagely or too often

giving comps no one asks for. Soon,

to give notice, I’ll hunt

for my landlord’s face, somewhere off Wade

fused to its screen door

beside a number I never fail to forget

so that I have to nose among the bougainvillea

& carports, which, besides the river

are all that stays dry:

slake & slag

squared to the outrush, forgotten most easily

when crossed.

+

Dingbat & waterway. Their laughter slashed to the banks.

+

On the white

of the peeled-off label, one of them

scrawls the address.

Tahan he says means last.

+

For them

the forest was what they could see

& because at the end of each day they could

still see

more than they could cut the next,

they could choose:

fire over water.

Stihl over crosshatch.

Smoke over lianas.

Dusk over sleep.

+

Below us

the restaurant floats;

the Tahan muddies the Tembeling.

+

One of us

had secretly shouldered the Scotch

from Narita to Jerantut

into shade that had never known ice

& consequently teemed with life

so that inside the hide’s rain-smattered slats

we could hold all...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Audiometry
• Tula
• The Poet’s Mother at Eleven, Killing a Chicken
• Tula
• Notation
• Tula
• Tula
• Counting in Tagalog
• Tula
• [Island of the Shy Mynah Bird]
• McKinley Praying
• The Silverest Tongue in the Philippines
• [Island in the Infinitive]
• Unfinished Poem
• [Island of the Little Mouthfuls]
• [Island of Fault Lines]
• Tula
• Virginity
• Tula
• Tula
• Photograph: Loggers at Kuala Tahan
• [Island En Passant]
• Tula
• Transpacific
• Night Letter to Rilke
• Hele in C
• [Island without Ancestors]
• ultra / sound
• Still Life with Transduction
• Some Words
• Gloss
• [Nesology]
• Tula
• Tula
• Tula
• Tula
• Tula
• A Year in the Snow Country
• Where the Fathers Wait
• Hele
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author