Works
BOOKS:
JUAN LUNA'S REVOLVER
Luisa A. Igloria
(University of Notre Dame Press, forthcoming, November 2008)
2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry
The poems in Juan Luna's Revolver ponder the influence of specific historical
moments on any reader who can claim a connection to the idea of heritage;
as well as on thinkers and artists and the ways in which they consider
the nature and relevance of their subject/s, their audience, and the
material/s with which they seek to make art.
In Juan Luna's Revolver, poems act as vehicles of speculation and time
travel. They revisit the lives of Filipino intellectuals and artists
who left the Spanish colony in the east, for Europe in the 1800s. It
is away from the homeland or patria, in their travels and studies abroad,
that they first arrive at the idea of "nation" – one
that eventually leads to acts of individual and collective identity
as well as subversion: a Filipino scholar and medical student writes
two novels igniting the 1896 peasant revolution which successfully overthrows
the Spanish colonial government in the Philippines; a group of Filipino
artists attend Buffalo Bill Cody's "Wild West Show" in the
Paris Universal Exposition of 1889, and despite its being a poor simulacrum
for the history of the "pacification" of Native American Indian
tribes in the Western territories, these Filipino colonial subjects
are inspired to subversively reappropriate the term "Indio"
which heretofore had only been used pejoratively by colonial authorities
for the native.
The title poem for this collection was partly inspired by the life and
work of the Filipino painter and revolutionary Juan Luna, whose mural
"Spoliarium" (showing defeated Roman gladiators being dragged
from the arena) was awarded one of two gold medals in the Exposicion
General de Bellas Artes in Madrid in the late 1870s. Luna's life took
a provocative turn after he fatally shot his wife and mother-in-law
in their Paris apartment, in a fit of jealousy.
Poems in the collection also reflect on themes of power, perspective,
nostalgia, spectacle and spectatorship, in the context of the 1904 St.
Louis World's Fair and Exposition to which over 1,100 indigenous Filipino
people were transported to serve as live exhibits there— alongside
Ainus from Japan, and Native American Indian chieftains like Geronimo.
Still other poems, like "In the Clothing Archive" and "Letras
y Figuras", meditate on archival and artifactual objects from museums
and from domestic life.
CORDILLERA TALES (New Day, 1990); 1991 National Book
Award (Manila Critics Circle, Philippines)
CARTOGRAPHY (Anvil, 1992); 1993 National Book Award
for Poetry (Manila Critics Circle, Philippines)
ENCANTO (Anvil, 1993); 1994 National Book Award for
Poetry (Manila Critics Circle, Philippines)
IN THE GARDEN OF THE THREE ISLANDS (Moyer Bell/Asphodel,
1995)
BLOOD SACRIFICE (University of the Philippines Press,
1997); 1998 National Book Award for Poetry (Manila Critics Circle, Philippines)
SONGS FOR THE BEGINNING OF THE MILLENIUM (De La Salle
University Press, 1997); Finalist, 1998 National Book Award for Poetry
(Manila Critics Circle, Philippines)
TURNINGS: Writing on Women’s Transformations
co-edited with Renee Olander (Friends of Women’s Studies at Old
Dominion University, March 2000)
NOT HOME, BUT HERE: Writing from the Filipino Diaspora,
as central editor (Anvil, 2003)
TRILL AND MORDENT (WordTech Editions, fall 2005); Runner-up,
2004 Editions Prize
BOOK COVERS:
 Trill
& Mordent
© September 2005
Word Tech Editions
Order Trill & Mordent online from:
wordtech
web
broadstreetbooks.com
amazon.com
barnesandnoble.com
 NOT
HOME, BUT HERE:
Writing from the Filipino Diaspora,
as central editor (Anvil, 2003)
Luisa Igloria's work appears in the following
anthologies:
 Going
Home to a Landscape,
ed. Marianne Villanueva and
Virginia Cerenio (Calyx, 2003)
 To
Mend the World:
Women Reflect on 9/11,
ed. Marjorie Agosin and
Betty-Jean Craige
(White Pine, 2002)
BACK TO TOP
|
