POETS OF QUEENS

The dualities in Paolo Javier’s deceptively slim new volume of poetry span the formal and topical, featuring a serial poem that revels in/reveals the slipperiness of desire and separation from place and language in the Dreaming, and a long poem that roars at white supremacy, misogyny, and horizontal hate in our nightmare moment of late US American empire. Oneiric and concrete, modular and incantatory, Near Your Mirror Home (Stay On) takes readers on a voyage to its depths, while signaling exciting new turns in the poetics of one of Queens County’s more restless language artists.

Finalist for the Big Other Book Award for Poetry.

Check out CLMP's reading list for Filipino American History Month.

Listen to Paolo Javier on the Truth to Power Show episode 292.

Read Paolo Javier's work in poem-a-day

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Details

ISBN: 979-8-9904733-2-4

Paperback, 64 pages, 5 x 7 in

Publication Date: November 1, 2024

$12

“Near Your Mirror Home (Stay On) is a potent double-barreled work that is guaranteed to “blast through angelic listlessness.” In the entrancing hypnagogic montage “Near Your Mirror Home (Return to Nicholson Road),” which opens this volume, Javier goes “Deep within the muscle of The Dreaming,” colliding images and linguistic textures to conjure “a surprise theater of astonishment.” The second piece “Beside the Poem by Raúl Cordero in Times Square” is an inspired work of Asian American documentalism, which forcefully chants down white supremacist imperialism and AAPI hate. In Javier’s hands, words are what Aimé Césaire might call “miraculous weapons” that movingly resist “our rhythm / of violence / un / -stemmed.” With deceptive ease, Javier shuttles back and forth between the local and the global, the individual and the collective, the personal and the public, the mythic and the contemporary. If this sounds like magick, that’s because it is.” -- Michael Leong

“Near Your Mirror Home (Stay On) is a charge to keep perceiving the self clearly even inside the toxic mess of object losses, consumption, and the way epics and their “thelemic boat” haunt the psychic landscape of kin immersed in urbanization. In “Beside The Poem by Raúl Cordero in Times Square,” we see how the “Deep within the muscle of The Dreaming” builds a moving and powerful libretto. As with all of Paolo Javier’s poetic works, he brilliantly fathoms lines with a “unique interior of hollowed-out meaning to write expressively” and urgently engages both the metropolis and its burdens producing compelling recurrences that innovate space, speech, and sound.” -- Prageeta Sharma

"Set against the world’s fragility and Ukraine’s fight for survival, Olena Boryshpolets’ bilingual poetry collection Orpheus and Eurydice in New York (Poets of Queens Press, 2024) is a journey into the harrowing separations war creates from nature, from homeland, and from oneself....these poems establish a new poetic architecture in which the brutality humans inflict on one another fuses with the saving grace inherent in the smallest of interactions between humanity and nature." -- Nicole Yurcaba, European Literature Network

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Details

ISBN: 979-8990473300

Paperback, 96 pages

Publication Date: May 21, 2024

$20

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