ENERO is a collection of poems that distill my daily experiences of being a researcher; embodying this body in a foreign city; becoming while also recognizing my lived experiences; and celebrating people who have fought to see better days.
The cover – a Filipina cyborg – depicts my ongoing internal debate of how living in these modern days has turned us into cyborgs without us even knowing. And even if we claim that we know and that we understand, I do think that the entirety of what this really means and where this can go is a fuzzy landscape of (un)knowns. This theme is also a recurring metaphor that I use in my poems, while I also play around metaphors of rearranging organs to express my confusions and frustrations.
This is Enero.
Cover art by Keanu Joseph Rafil