Feast

In Feast, Ina Cariño's debut poetry collection, imagery of food and the body builds an evocative picture of childhood in the Philippines and, later, life in the United States. Autobiographical verse records a Filipinx coming of age, with memories of head lice, learning about puberty from a book, and, in the title poem, watching the slaughter of a suckling pig. In the teasingly erotic "Milk," the speaker encounters racist assumptions from a white boyfriend and his parents. "Triptych with Cityscape" introduces another recurring topic: treatment for mental illness in a Chicago hospital. Metaphors draw on food and colors. Sepia is the hue of memory; salt preserves trauma, but honey sweetens the outlook. Cariño's vocabulary is visual and tangible, as in "my lungs/ turned to wrinkled quinces." The poet's gaze often turns to the body: "Shingles" recalls caring for an ill grandmother, and "Birthstone" reveals that their mother kept in her jewelry box a piece of the umbilical cord that once connected them.

"Tongue" is a key word throughout the collection, referring by turns to a prized foodstuff, a body part, or a language: "surrendering to a new tongue/ is having mine sliced/ on the jag of expectation:/ language cut on sweetened rim." Snippets of Tagalog enhance the pleasing rhythms created by alliteration. For instance, a poem about the aftermath of a 1990 earthquake in Luzon includes the line "follow trails of flies to find the faceless under rubble." A true banquet for the senses, Feast is perfect for readers of Cynthia Miller and Nina Mingya Powles. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader, and blogger at Bookish Beck

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