The Projects

In a series of brief notes, Unbecoming explores questions of loss, illness, pain, and disability. It attends to the minutiae of everyday life shaped by illness and injury to center the ordinariness of non-healthiness under capital and empire, as well as the ways in which this unwellness invites new forms of political belonging and solidarity.

“What happens to the self when it permits the transgressive act? Past the boundaries of its predicament, the self in elsewhere held and lingered survives fractured, casting a vigorously unforgiving eye back on itself and fatally attentive to the mullioned and unsteady narratives to which it has opened itself up. Cruz’s second collection of poems is rigorously imagined and wrought with such tenacity that makes reading it a pleasure but none the less harrowing.”—Mabi David

Poems inspired by academia, bad jokes, bureaucracy, dreams, ennui, fatigue, gerygones, guilt, misgivings, paper dolls, petty resentments, rooftops, self-importance, sewing, squandered love, submeters, wishes.

“At this historical moment when the issue of how to respond to suffering is so fraught as to leave us speechless, the poems of Conchitina Cruz have found a way to speak. Here in this starkly beautiful volume, she has discovered a language sufficient to the terrors and the joys of the contemporary. The highest praise that can be given to any work of literature—and Dark Hours is most surely literature—is that it is contemporary. This is a very remarkable book.”—Lynn Emanuel 

Diaz maps a network of texts emerging from the experience of Philippine modernity and its various artifacts like nation and narrative even as the world hurtles toward ecological collapse. Part poetics, unsent love letter, and critique of knowledge production, it looks for the forest in the novels of Rizal and other fictions, in museum exhibits, webinars, buildings, bureaucratic reports, and legislation.

Sa Punan, nag-iimis at nagtatagni-tagni si Faye Cura ng mga teksto para magpalagay ng tinig ng iba’t ibang babae—manunulat, artista, mga tauhan sa mito, mistiko, mandirigma—sa tula. Gamit ang salin ni Anne Carson sa Ingles ng mga kapi (fragment) ni Sappho bilang batayang teksto, sinasalin ni Cura si Sappho sa pamamagitan ni Carson sa Filipino, pagkuwa ay nagsusulat sa tabi at pagitan ng mga linya, upang magpalitaw ng mga pagnanasa, tunggalian, at pananalig ng iba’t ibang tagapagsalita.

Award-winning critical darling and perennial bestseller—at least one thousand print copies sold out—the El Bimbo Variations is now back in print with a new cover, one new variation, and half a dozen grammatical edits! Read, cry, and marvel at one of the best testaments to the endurance of art across language, culture, and history! Free to download here!

In You Are Here, Mabi David examines the role of the secondary witness in memorial work, confronting the limits and possibilities of speaking from the position of the bystander, tourist, researcher, archivist, and artist. First published in 2009, this book of poetry was written largely in response to David’s encounter with the archives of Memorare Manila, a committee consisting of the survivors of the Battle for Manila in 1945.