Cultural Evidence

This vital first collection by California-native Cariaga is a deep, occasionally tentative consideration of issues of nation and self--of belonging and exile--and of the temporal and cultural traces of the ""subaltern."" The epigraph to section one is quoted from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's seminal avant-garde visual/literary work Dictee, and Cariaga, like Cha, strikes the reader with a various salvo--polyglot prose, ""Language"" style fragmentation, disembodied dialogue (taken, it appears, from a real or imagined Ilocano/English primer), and such quotations as a sequence of passages from the Bible, or uncorrected transcriptions of her arthritic father's commentary on her poems: ""All along you had good humor, but your/ last sentence is the real trougth. That/ makes an ending or conclusion."" Her lyricism runs from direct, formally uncomplicated lines--a short poem runs ""Of course/ They didn't eat dogs./ They didn't have dogs./ If they had dogs/ they would have eaten them""--to more sophisticated structures that suggest Projective Verse's atonality, such as the charming, but haunting, poem about the mating season of the grunion. Other passages strike with the first-hand authority of a survivor, as in ""No Mercy."" The long poem ""No Tasaday"" is a fascinating account of National Geographic's potentially fabricated story on the Tasaday people of the Phillipine Islands, who, in some accounts, are merely a hoax--""the easiest way to visit the Tasaday is not in the caves, but in the Saturday markets"" states one epigraph. Whether deconstructing myths of anthropology's objectivety, of ""culture"" as defined by different, often incompatible worldviews, or self-sustaining myths of non-fluid time, nation, place or language, Catalina's passionate investigations provide ample evidence for their dispersal. (Oct.) FYI: Members of the Subpress Collective fund their books by contributing 1% of their annual income to their ventures. This is the collective's first release.