Book Review By Lisbeth Coiman
As a writer, I grapple with the immigrant dilemma of allowing contradicting parts of me to find their way in my work or isolate them and write from a specific perspective. In nature felt but never apprehended, Angela Peñaredondo navigates the intersecting paths of immigration and gender politics: A Filipino immigrant struggling to find a home while holding a permanent longing, breaks down their family’s history in search of DNA clues for gender identity.
Earth scientists, botanists, and nature aficionados all learn to read the environment for clues. A rock can tell how old a mountain is and animal behavior can warn the explorer of environmental dangers ahead. Peñaredondo’s collection nature felt but never apprehended is a field trip in search of ancestral cues in the Philipine’s mountainous landscape. Peñaredondo approaches their themes from a naturalist perspective, naming and interpreting their environment to create the paradigm defining diasporic Filipino queer identity.
This four-part collection begins by offering a life raft “I set your weight on a raft” in a ritual for the ancestors the poet is about to dissect, “steel pointed like hawk bone at your bare collar.” First, the poet confronts the lineage of colonized bodies “excavating the bedrock” of the mountain range during the Battle for Manila in 1945 and placing two male lovers at its center under the heavy weight of Catholic dogma.
The imagery in these first poems does not exoticize the tropics nor the male participants of the story. Rather it presents the Philippines in all its complex glory: magnificent nature, Catholic culture, battleground during World War II, “feminization of wage labor,” all occurring “before [the poet’s] birth, who, like a geographer, must go beyond the “excavated map” to understand their legacy. This is the “survivor’s topography.”
However, it’s in the geological analysis that the poet focuses on the women in their ancestry and where her craft shines. Here the poet sees past the exoticization of the tropical female “adorn[ed] in teknite,” “at the Tsubaki nighclub,” “bar girl in a fish tank,” to state “you are much more than others realize.” The last four poems of this first part dissect the patriarchy “lithification/”fossilization and what it means to look beyond the fetish, “love us in our deviancy.”
The poet names body parts, symptoms, and diseases to stress how internalized oppression is in the female body. As it is shown in “exigencies of layers i & ii” where the poet questions the women have assisted pathologies in the perpetuation of these patterns.
Cuticle
Upper epidermis
Epidermal hair
Substomatal chamber
Palisade mesophyll
Xylem
Air channel
Guard cell
Stoma
Phloem
Chloroplasts
Lower epidermis
Thus, Peñaredondo creates a true paradigm of what it means to see past the oppression and go beyond a painful transformation. But the poet refuses to stay in survival and ends the first part presenting the rest of the collection as a resistance story.
In the second part, the transformation takes place with blunt imagery. It’s all about the coming out Queer. The poems become longer, the spaces widen, and the overall structure shifts, patterns emerge. From scattered lines across the page, to brief prose passages, the verses compel us to read in silence, masticate every blunt image, pause, reflect. These poems turn the previously described violence against women into love.
“My fist
…
i can make love with it”
Columns and double columns appear as if grabbing the reader by the shoulders and facing them with a harsh reality.
Hunger : rain :: fever : black stone
Lexicon without apparent connection rains on the page as if words and dates fall off the poem as gender affirmations surface and become the focal point. Then, brief poetic prose passages erupt like the volcanic imagery across the entire collection to reveal the magma within:
“she’ll gulp oysters and mussels down with no desire for the palm wine, she’ll read books, floating on their side, spectral algae trickling their brain and wanted curvy fat. in that unreachable sky some human might describe as precious or turquoise, she knows paradise lives elsewhere.”
In the third part, the poet exposes the immigrant conundrum as the desire for a home while holding a permanent longing. Then exquisite poetry arises, one where imagery and reflection intertwine to create delicate passages holding powerful truths.
“how must one proceed toward potential when splintered enough, boiled down to transparent bits rendered invisible, seen as conformity.”
“exile is a river at the end … ”
“suspension & assimilation with a distant border in view
or lack– . . .”
“to classify as anything but singular is an intervention, a bridge between migration and when
trauma exposes the hybridity of the self, it exposes the multiple, often
incompatible . . .”
The fourth part “holds the contradictions” with a letter to self that gives the poet permission to be all the parts of themselves in harmony. An interesting poem written in couplets in a rhythmic composition marked with abundant spaces naming the identity “queer” “gay immigrant child raised in the 90’s” “kweens”, the origin “Bisayan princess” and their art “haranistas.” It also presents those who refuse “to awaken on the part of the subject,” the lineage that killed “femme supremacy.” Poetry forms shift again, to include lists, “Induction to Self-loyalty,” and an interesting poem written in columns, “studies in becoming prayer” which works as a contrapunto between three different voices. The collection ends with an intriguing bilingual poem titled “albularya”–the name for a witch doctor in Philippines. “albularya” suggests the poet had been subject to this ritualistic cure/cleanse to cure the child of a serious ailment. The reader can only wonder if their family tried to pray the gay away or if the child’s life had been in danger.
“for my famished body lipstick to remind me that death
although marked in shade is never monochrome.”
We are in the presence of a poet who is not afraid to explore their past in an intelligent and thorough analysis. nature felt but never apprehended stays with me for it focuses on nature to interpret the colonization of the Filipino diaspora uncovers fossilized patriarchy encrusted at different levels of the poet’s ancestry, “those before us.”
By naming body parts, diseases, and symptoms, the poet stresses how internalized patriarchy and oppression are in the bodies. New patterns indicate the bravery of breaking off tradition to allow for gender identification.
At times a geographer “excavating maps,” at times, a botanist naming plants, mostly a geologist analyzing fossils, the poet uses the lexicon of sciences to name a reality amalgamated in colonized ancestry to reveal the DNA clues that pointed at queerness for generations in a family of Filipino immigrants.
In their nature felt but never apprehended, Angela Peñaredondo embraces their gender identification while holding a longing for the homeland and all the contradictions within. This collection is a gift for those who understand longing and struggle to decipher their own past.
Lisbeth Coiman is a bilingual author who has wandered the immigration path from her native Venezuela to Canada and last to the US where she now resides. Her debut book, I Asked the Blue Heron: A Memoir (2017) explores the intersection between immigration and mental health. Her bilingual poetry collection, Uprising / Alzamiento (Finishing Line Press, 2021) portrays the faces of Venezuela’s complex economic and political unrest.