Barbara Jane Reyes – författare

2018 California Book Award Finalist

Feminist experimental poetry in the tradition of Audre Lorde and Theresa Kyung Cha from a prominent Filipina American poet.

"Reyes writes with conviction about the various ways imperialism transforms women into 'capital, collateral, damaged soul.' However, the women that appear throughout the book are not merely victims; in Reyes's radical cosmology, these women-these daughters—are rebels, saints, revolutionaries, and torchbearers, 'sharp-tongued, willful.' This book is a call to arms against oppressive languages, systems, and traditions."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Infused with Spanish and Tagalog, Reyes's beautiful, angry verse shines throughout. For a wide range of readers."—Library Journal, starred review

"I cannot shout 'brilliant' loud enough. Start to this finish, Invocation to Daughters is truth. 'I am not your ethnic spectacle. I am not your cultural poverty. You / don't get to frame me.' This is a book you read and teach and live."—Anthony Cody, author of Borderland Apocrypha

Invocation to Daughters is a book of prayers, psalms, and odes for Filipina girls and women trying to survive and make sense of their own situations. Writing in an English inflected with Tagalog and Spanish, in meditations on the relationship between fathers and daughters and impassioned pleas on behalf of victims of brutality, Barbara Jane Reyes unleashes the colonized tongue in a lyrical feminist broadside written from a place of shared humanity.

Praise for Invocation to Daughters:

"Against violence against women, Barbara Jane Reyes rips and runs, jumping off Audre Lorde's 'the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house,' Invocation to Daughters recombines registers—prayers, pleas and elegy—braiding a trilingual triple-threat, a 3-pronged poetics that enjambs and reconfigures the formal with the street, utterance with erasure, the prose sentence with the liminal. Invocation to Daughters reminds me of the 70's in the East Bay, when Jessica Hagedorn met Ntozake Shange and ignited a green flash seen from horizon to horizon. Barbara Jane Reyes is one of the Bay Area's incendiary voices."—Sesshu Foster, author of ELADATL

"Invocation to Daughters is a space for multitudes, a hypnotic collection that draws from family history—particularly the complex cultural gendered dynamic between father and daughter—in order to create a manual for emancipation from the interior and exterior binds that keep us from ourselves. Through prayers, calls to actions, and testimonies, Reyes invents 'a language so that we know ourselves, so that we may sing, and tell, and pray.'"—Carmen Giméeacute;nez Smith, author of Be Recorder and Cruel Futures

Tagalog is a language spoken by twenty-two million people in the Philippines. Diwata is a Tagalog term meaning "muse." Diwata is also a term for a mythical being who resides in nature, and who human communities must acknowledge, respect, and appease in order to live harmoniously in this world.

In her book Diwata, Barbara Jane Reyes frames her poems between the Book of Genesis creation story and the Tagalog creation myth, placing her work somewhere culturally between both traditions. Also setting the tone for her poems is the death and large shadow cast by her grandfather, a World War II veteran and Bataan Death March survivor, who has passed onto her the responsibility of remembering. Reyes'' voice is grounded in her community''s traditions and histories, despite war and geographical dislocation.

From "Estuary 2":

She was born with fins and fishtail,A quick blade slicing water.

She was her father''s mermaid child,A river demon, elders said.

She mimicked her cetaceous brothers,Abalone diving bluest depths.

She polished smooth her brothers'' masks,Inlaid nacre half moon eyes.

She lit oak pyres and bade the windA whispered requiem.

Barbara Jane Reyes is author of two previous poetry collections including Poeta en San Francisco, which was awarded the 2005 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. She was born in Manila and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She works as adjunct professor in Philippine studies at the University of San Francisco.