cover image Delivered

Delivered

Sarah Gambito, . . Persea, $14 (64pp) ISBN 978-0-89255-346-4

“I play on my america xylophone/ and the kids drop peach hat by aching peach hat,” says Gambito midway through one of the giddy, fragment-filled, enthusiastic, sometimes flirtatious odes and self-portraits of this second collection, attendant simultaneously to Gambito's Filipino-American heritage and the outlook of 21st-century youth. “I am the new bathing suit that I am,” she declares in “Immigration,” one of a few poems by that name: this one takes an epigraph from the Egyptian Book of the Dead and an interlinear exclamation from the Filipino language Tagalog. Gambito (Matadora ) evokes a carnival of multiethnic references, intuitive leaps and fiery existential queries: “I like God alright but I don't understand anything he's talking about.” She might be likened to such other cosmopolitan poets as Matthea Harvey or Mark Bibbins: Gambito also excels in one-line stanzas, in long knockout titles (“A Borderless Ethos Would Please Everyone”) and in dreamy one-paragraph prose poems. Yet if such forms make her seem solitary or disconnected, her topics make her memories, and her loyalties, multiply clear: “You were born here. I was born there.” (Jan.)