June's Featured Poet is Nick Carbo, editor of PinoyPoetics , who just released his third poetry collection, Andalusian Dawn . Here's some information about and sample poems from Nick's new book:

Andalusian Dawn , Nick Carbó's third full-length poetry collection, is a lush, sensual collection of lyrics on interior and exterior landscapes. Many of the poems are drawn from the geographic and cultural backdrop of Spain, where the poet spent time on a writing residency; others are drawn from the more elusive well of history, biography, and literature itself. Andualusian Dawn is at once Nick Carbó's most ambitious collection and his most intimate, and establishes him as a major figure of his generation.

Praise for Andalusian Dawn
“In Andalusian Dawn, Nick Carbó creates a new, sweet language. This collection hums with tenderness, revelry, and pays special tribute to the importance of memory. Carbó shows his extraordinary range with this, his newest collection, that will make you want to visit Andalusia and reimagine the geography of your heart's home.”—Crystal Williams

“The spirits of Lorca, the gypsies who inspired him, and the great poets of al-Andalus, preside over Nick Carbó's Andalusian Dawn. These poems are filled with a voluble silence in which we hear the ‘cricket-sound dark' and see ‘millions of fireflies/ burning in rows and rows between us.' Carbó's poems, like those of his predecessors, are conflagrations made of music and image.”—Michael Collier

About the Author
Nick Carbó is the author of El Grupo McDonald's (1995) and Secret Asian Man (2000), which won the Asian American Literary Award. He has edited two anthologies of Philippine literature: Returning a Borrowed Tongue (1996) and Babaylan (2000). He also edited an anthology, Sweet Jesus (2002), with Denise Duhamel. Among his awards are grants in poetry from the NEA and NYFA (1999), and residencies from Fundacion Valparaiso (Spain), Le Chateau de Lavigny (Switzerland), the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo.

SAMPLE POEMS FROM ANDALUSIAN DAWN:

VIENTO

This Almeria wind has the strength to scare
even the most sturdy of souls,
viene en carcajadas--comes in fits of laughter,

with the clear intent of diamonds--
a thousand hands banging
every open window of this house.

TORMENTA ELECTROMAGNETICO

Did you hear the thrumming storm clouds
passing by Don Carmelo's house last night?

His donkeys started drawing maps to Nerja,
his goats put on their second-hand suits,

and all you could see were tiny
television sets swarming the property lines.

Within minutes they found me on my porch
and circled above my head, showing

me images of your face, your face watching
your husband's hands. I can't wait

to fax my string around your wrists, tie you
to my barometric bed and begin

a correspondence of our flesh. The sky will buzz
as you lick your guilty desires off my chest.

SERENA

Lai lai le le ay!
Busco la moon, la lunera
on the corner of ayer
in the decade of bad ideas.

Castigado for the castration
of sugar confessions en la bañera
da me un beso she said
dancing away with the slippery hose.

LA COMARCA

La luz of a thousand years
brimming in a glass of vino blanco,
my corner table en el Cafe del Caballo Rojo
asks for your voz de verano.

I lost my breath one evening
in Cuevas del Almanzora, un plato
cracked on the rim of midnight
donde quema el alma de Andalucia.

AY! QUE DOLO!

Dona Josefina has thrown my goat
out onto the calle El Fez--
Ay! The menu of pain is as big
as a queen-sized aha umbrella.

The lolita from the barrio chino licks
the sellos and then my luau--
there is a hint of ajo from Ab-derabad,
with periodos of adages and lapis lazuli.

I have known the fonda of Dona Josefina,
the jetty of her hips, under the veil
of her mild protests where pigs and lox
do mix in a yodel of ah-do-do-dah.

The lolita from the barrio chino is a rider
of net gains and bronze sea snakes--
she holds a baroque club in one hand
and ma of mana from a mouse in the other.

PAREJAS

If you kill a scorpion, its partner will come
looking for its mate is an old saying

of the gitanos of the Levante. I was careful
to include the whole body of that fat scorpion

and squeeze two hundred pounds on the leather sole
of my left shoe. In bed, I worry

about the partner I missed, the one
who is probably scurrying up the dirt road,

following my every other foot step
to the sixth house with three lighted

windows on the second floor. I imagine
a lethal stinger getting bigger and bigger,

filling with anger as it nears the scent
of the leather shoe and of the foot

that has killed its mate. All I see now
is just a giant stinger navigating

the black and white checkered tiles
of the first floor. I'm gripped

by that helpless fear in the faces
of the men in the movie Jaws

when they spot the fin of the great white shark
circling their sinking boat. I lift

the bed sheet--my wife's thigh warmly pressed
over mine. I caress the slope of her shoulder,

whisper in her ear if anyone ever harms you,
I'll track that person down. She responds

in mid-dream speech Yes, honey, we'll talk
about it in the morning.

*********************

NEW POEMS FROM ANNABELLE A. UDO

Born in Portsmouth, Virginia and raised in Stockton, California, Annabelle A. Udo is the former Editor of Rewind Magazine , a Bay Area club/music magazine published in the early ‘90s. Additionally, she is the former Executive Editor for Wushu KungFu, Qigong , and World of Martial Arts magazines. Annabelle lives in San Francisco, California and is a featured artist on “Evidence,” a CD documenting a collective of Bay Area Filipino/a American poets including Al Robles, Eric Fructuoso, Tony Robles, Theodore S. Gonsalvez, Marianne Villaneuva, Dawn Mabalon, Jaime Jacinto, Oscar Penaranda and Catalina Carriaga (Jeepney Dash Records/Bindlestiff Studio).

“Untitled Death”

so. . .there is life after death. . .
it's a different kind of breath.
Living, though you are already dead,
Dying, in order to truly be alive.
Meeting face to face with your owner
In a dark garden
In search of the light at the gate.
Hoping that it will open
With your arrival.

". . . And Now a Word From Our Sponsors"

"68 Dead"
The headlines read
Today. Just another day in Basra.
And the government says "Allelujah!
Fire ablaze again in Fallujah"--
When
will all this fighting end?
Saddam is on trial
Meanwhile,
Bush is on a blazing trail back
to make the White House even whiter.
Kerry is scary
when he talks about more troops,
That's the poop on the scoops
of America
These days.
Iraq is under attack
and people of color in America
are constantly watching their backs.
And the KKK
Seems to be OK
With the U.S. of A,
Pioneers of terror,
Extension of the führer,
Look in the mirror
And that's not what I see
When I look at you
And you look at me.
Then in a flash
It seems to be over,
Back to Mars and NASA's little red rover
Roam the streets of another planet
Back to the FCC's
Obsession with Janet.
Daily subsistence,
Daily abstractions,
Life's existence
Is going out of fashion
When there comes this
Day when we are fighting in the Holy City,
That's really pretty shitty.

The Morgue

The homeless man's soul finds his home upon death. The shell he leaves behind—anonymous—unclaimed—in the cold shelving unit of the hospital.

Just a body found on the street with shopping cart in tow. He carried his possessions around as if it were a golden idol. He was the son of someone—carried in the womb and given life the same way all of us have entered this world—created by a sperm and an egg. How could he be so forgotten?

His flesh and blood and bones unidentified though it pulsated with ancestors no matter what. He has become merely a statistic for the doctors to base their studies. A cadaver that's taking up too much space in their storage room—decomposing and becoming a public safety hazard.

Meanwhile, the streets of this city that swallowed him up, glisten with spilled whiskey and cum, and has no mercy for the weary who, regardless of the choices they make, deserve the same justice as anyone else because if death makes us equal, then why not life as well?

Peace to this man who remains unclaimed, but in God's world he already knows his name.

*********************

the time at the end of this writing
poems by Paolo Javier
http://www.ahadadabooks.com/

In his first collection of poetry, 'The Time At The End Of This Writing' , Paolo Javier asks, "Would you like to see your present now or later?" He answers by overlapping his present life in New York with his childhood spent in Manila and Cairo and imagined senior years referred to as “The Lid To The Great Jar." Javier's poems sail over the handlebars of a Huffy bicycle; saunter through the city onto balconies with lovers; respond to the visual art of Manuel Ocampo and curse a botched reading of Tagalog. Words exalt, tease, and desire, with a youthful sense of being old enough to reflect on moments either cherished or indignantly "shorn of any relevance to this day." Through it all, there is an insistence on admitting to what is reached for.

Advance Praise for "The Time At The End Of This Writing":
"Paolo Javier's confident, emotionally variable poems work at a point where sensory information runs into the artistic reality of building and negotiating surfaces. But instead of giving in to one force or the other they inhabit the mess that collision makes, insisting that art and life remain tangled up. "I don't want to be another story, you know?" one asks, knowing story is part of the deal of moving through time at all. These are perceptive poems; that there is pleasure despite it all in never knowing what might happen next is no small part of what they know."
- Anselm Berrigan, author of 'Zero Star Hotel' (Edge Books)

"One of Paolo Javier's poems is four words: “the words/the spaces”. In The Time At The End Of This Writing, the words are ahead of the time they're in at present—throughout. Paolo Javier makes words be beside images or beside spaces—equality and separation of space and image and word that's a 3D sculpture wherein the courting lover always in bed and out in NYC flies up to his intended and appears to be Paolo Javier (translated as say Berrigan). By the end of the writing, that person is apparently someone over fifty with some other given life in place (whereas Paolo Javier is young, in his twenties), the someone over fifty not a character or “voice” as ventriloquism but ventriloquism of space and words that undo and at once heighten the previous spaces new like pressing the lips to the page."
- Leslie Scalapino, author of 'Zither & Autobiography' (Wesleyan University Press)

"Hip, sexy, energetic, Paolo Javier gives mad respect to his artistic and poetic predecessors in 'The Time At The End Of This Writing'. His voice is clear and tender, these poems controlled in disruptions of narrative, never falling into obscure terrain. They are skillfully crafted and tight, a pleasure to roll off the tongue and view on the page. This Original Brown Boy has given us a lovely and fierce collection of poems that dismantle how ethnic writers in North America are expected to write. It's about time."
- Barbara Jane Reyes, author of 'Gravities of Center' (Arkipelago Books)

"Paolo Javier may end his book by "submitting” to Rilke, Neruda and Berrigan. But not with a bowed head. He submits to Poetry's Call and deservedly ascends the crowded shelves with his first book equal to those whose works he imbibed, but then alchemized into his history as a poet. His history as the "Original Brown Boy" Poet. By forming original poems, Javier subverts the colonialism that imposed a language upon his ancestors. He does so by finding the gold not previously found by other poets whose first language is English. Piquant, passionate, perky, panting, "pointy" Paolo-poems result from Javier's refusal to "lament the decisions that made me." In no uncertain English terms, Paolo dares, "Fuck me." Which is to say, Fuck lineage -- dismissively as well as lovingly."
- Eileen Tabios, author of 'Reproductions From An Empty Flagpole' (Marsh Hawk)

the time at the end of this writing
Paolo Javier
96 Pages
ISBN 0-9732233-1-6
Paperback / 5.75” x 7.75”
Retail Price $12.95 (USD)/ $17.95 (CDN)
Ordering Information: http://www.ahadadabooks.com/

*********************

E IS FOR EDUCATIONAL!

Eileen Tabios' Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole is a new “Bestseller for Classes” over at Small Press Distribution. She's in great company with other bestsellers like Seeing Out Loud by Jerry Saltz, The Business of Fancy Dancing by Sherman Alexie, The Granite Pail: The Selected Poems of Lorine Niedecker , Never Mind: Twenty Poems and a Story by Taha Muhammad Ali, and This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color , edited by Cherie L. Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldua. If you haven't yet, check out Eileen's book; at this link are a couple of sample poems: http://marshhawkpress.org/tabios.htm

*********************

OSCAR'S HEART (from “ The Chatelaine's Poetics”, Eileen Tabios' Blog )

the only dream more
painful is the one left
unpursued
and no-song is better
than a thousand bad ones
--from "Bayani's Tune" by Oscar Penaranda

Just received poet and teacher Oscar Penaranda's first -- and long-desired by many -- poetry collection: FULL DECK (jokers playing) (T'boli Publishing, 2004). It's a moving read -- lots of heart, lots of love, lots of humor, lots of compassion, lots of history ... I could go on, but let me just quote what Oscar wrote inscribed in the copy he sent me:

"All writing is one big poker game."

Here are two poems:

The Fire Hydrant

The fire hydrant squats priest-like
.....invulnerable
and lonely beside a long
red unparked curb
and
with long supressed energy
bursts out
in splendor and glory

when the fire raged

Salinlahi / A Different Dreamer

Forgive me

if my dreams were not
made of Hollywood
technicolor soda-pop snow
and golden gate banks and
push button automatic
self-styling hairsprays

Twenty dollars an hour
and where it's even hard
to get a job as a maid they pay
so high and they say
the servants here are richer than the masters there
forgive me

If my dream was just
to someday climb
afrenzied on their highest hill
and sound the conch shells
of my conscience
blast my guts out blowing
somewhere on this earth
there is a noble and tragic
race whose songs
beg for the singing

And believe me there
were times when I too tried
to stil the voices till
the volcanos erupted even

in my sleep I could get
no more peace forgive
me if
my dreams
were not to suck
what is theirs
but to pour what is ours

*****

Do yourself a favor and get yourself a copy of Oscar's book; I believe you can place the order through the publisher's e-mail: tiboli@comcast.net. Here are some "advance words":

The poet tells you many things -- a mirror reflecting ourselves. And underneath it all, like a hidden stream, reveals all you need to know about life. His beautiful poems have been long overdue.
--Al Robles

Penaranda's poems, like his stories, are lyrical testimonials of what is, what isn't, and an intense longing for what can never be. HIs voice is mature and sensitive, lamenting yet sure. His experience of laboring in the fields of California and in the Alaskan canneries provides him deep erespect for the first generations of Pinoys who paved the path before him. Following in the footsteps of Carlos Bulosan, Penaranda gives witness to the struggle of daily life with dignity and compassion.
--Jeff Tagami

Oscar Penaranda chose Poetry to tell stories, most notably of the Filipino American experience. So why didn't he choose fiction? Because the stories resonate beyond what can be expressed by words. What breathes between the lines of his poems is an ache-ridden love borne of the mating of loss and desire -- a haunting that transcends such references as "There was this/ ragged iron bar/ that by accident crushed my/ toe/ when I with leathered gloves/ worked with steel/ in Alaska..." Fortunately, Poetry also chose Oscar Penaranda as evident in a poem like "A Song" where he sings, "So long as the world/ touches me/ my heart strings will never stop/ playing the music."
--Eileen Tabios

*********************

PRE-RELEASE SPECIAL ON LUIS H. FRANCIA'S NEW POETRY COLLECTION, MUSEUM OF ABSENCES

Meritage Press is pleased to announce the publication of a new poetry collection by Luis H. Francia, Museum of Absences, copublished with the University of the Philippines Press and due to be released this summer.

Museum of Absences grew out of Francia's insistent sense of the void that haunts our contemporary lives, whether because of politics, faith, history, or personal circumstance. With such themes as loss, transcendent love, and revelation, the book's three sections introduce us to a wide array of personae, from a Filipino old-timer looking back on a life of invisibility, to Cinderella in middle age, from a grandson communing with his deceased grandparents to a New Yorker responding to the horror of 9/11. However different the masks, the poet's voice remains consistently lyrical, with language heightened by irony, metaphor, and musicality. This collection is marked by poetic inventiveness--in a disaffected age, surely one of our most valuable resources.

Francia's collection has received advance praise, as follows:

In Museum of Absences we see a poet writing at the height of his virile, vatic powers. Luis H. Francia's themes of love, loss, and redemption weave through the collection with the expert hand of a Stéphane Mallarmé or a Federico Fellini. His uniquely New York poetic responses to the tragedy of 9/11 are some of the finest I have come across. This is a book you will return to again and again.
--Nick Carbo, author of Andalusian Dawn

In Luis H. Francia's Museum of Absences , the halls and corridors are lined with poems that assert their presence and history against indifference, erasure, and oblivion. These are poems that bristle with kinetic energy: They step out of their frames, ultimately refusing the cold elegance of a display case in order to run amok in the streets, start fires, stage rebellions, sing and fuck and love even in the shadow of apocalypse. Despite the variety in this collection, Francia's subject remains the Filipino:"The beauty of our darkness//... Our delicate bones, our/ Millennial colonial contradictions/ The humanity of the subjugated//...the thoughts of a brown man/ ...in the season of aridity." He gathers up the different fragments of our selves and treats them as reliquaries, uncovering their grammar and meaning, all the while offering the startling perspectives of "an aerialist of uncommon grace."
--Luisa Igloria, author of In the Garden of Three Islands and Encanto

Luis H. Francia is the author of the semiautobiographical Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago , honored with the 2002 PEN Center Open Book and the 2002 Asian American Writers literary awards. A winner of the Palanca Poetry Prize, one of the Philippines' most prestigious literary honors, Francia has two earlier books of poems-- Her Beauty Likes Me Well (with David Friedman) and The Arctic Archipelago and Other Poems , as well as a collection of reviews and essays, Memories of Overdevelopment . He edited Brown River, White Ocean: A Twentieth Century Anthology of Philippine Literature in English ; as well as Flippin': Filipinos on America , with Eric Gamalinda as coeditor; and, along with Angel Velasco Shaw, Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899-1999 . He writes,in New York, for The Village Voice and The Nation , and, in Manila, for The Sunday Inquirer Magazine . A tale of two cities--Manila and New York--Francia teaches at New York University.

In anticipation of Museum of Absences' summer release, Meritage Press is pleased to announce a Pre-Publication Special. For $12 (vs the U.S. retail price of $15) and free shipping/handling within the United States (normally a $3 value) per book, you can reserve a signed copy. This special ends on June 30, 2004. Please send checks, made out to "Meritage Press" to

Eileen Tabios
Meritage Press
2101 Sacramento Street, #303
San Francisco, CA 94109

For more information, please e-mail MeritagePress@aol.com