Tula: Poems

By Chris Santiago and A. Van Jordan

A debut poetry collection exploring themes of family and identity while examining the experiences of a second-generation Filipino immigrant in America.

Tula: a ruined Toltec capital; a Russian city known for its accordions; Tagalog for “poem.”

Prismatic, startling, rich with meaning yet sparely composed, Chris Santiago’s debut collection of poems—selected by A. Van Jordan as the winner of the 2016 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry—begins with one word and transforms it, in a dazzling sleight of hand, into a multivalent symbol for the immigrant experience. Tula: Santiago reveals to readers a distant land devastated by war. Tula: its music beckons in rhythms, time signatures, and lullabies. Tula: can the poem, he seems to ask, build an imaginative bridge back to a family lost to geography, history, and a forgotten language?

Inspired by the experiences of the second-generation immigrant who does not fully acquire the language of his parents, Tula paints the portrait of a mythic homeland that is part ghostly underworld, part unknowable paradise. Language splinters. Impossible islands form an archipelago across its landscape. A mother sings lullabies and a father works the graveyard shift in Saint Paul—while in the Philippines, two dissident uncles and a grandfather send messages and telegrams from the afterlife.

Deeply ambitious, a collection that examines the shortcomings and possibilities of both language and poetry themselves, Tula introduces a major new literary talent.

Praise for Tula

“A book that both transports us and transforms us.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen

“A debut collection that is a spare, elegant engagement with language. . . . Santiago’s struggles with identity are well-explored, but his linguistic savvy and precision truly stand out.” —Publishers Weekly

“Santiago seems to recognize that words will always hold power, even as their meanings evolve. Through everything, Tula delves into these nuances of language: how it is suppressed, how it is weaponized, how it loves, how it informs, and how it is often as fleeting as a birdsong. Tula is therefore a celebration of the ephemeral and the permanent, a lovely testament to the beauty of contradiction.” —Chicago Review of Books

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781571319548

Book preview

Audiometry

Because my son thinks I am a citadel—

soundproof.  A repository.

Because horsing around at bedtime he pierced

my cochlea with a pencil.

The first time I saw the inner ear

I thought it looked like a little life, thriving

but not yet big enough

for me to feel for it any kind of empathy.

By what were such things fed?

Would it overgrow its carapace

& make of the body a coppered bell?

And then I was sixteen & crossing

Saint Paul with my father.  A seashell

in his pocket which for his own reasons

he refuses to wear.  He can’t hear

the Chicano keeping pace behind us,

lean & loose-limbed,

clucking, Gooks, gooks.

For years, he’d sat a little further from us

each night at the dinner table

hollowed out by the roll of stock tickers

all through his graveyard hours.

It’s a remarkable machine

the nurse slides into my ear canal, built

to detect lies & arrhythmia & the trembling

of incalculable tranches of earth.

I pulled his pace toward mine but declined

to parse his solitude for him—planes

of salt-haloed stone refusing

to let footfalls cut to their holdings.

Tula

The linnet will be singing.

A man will awaken on his deathbed,

not yet cured.

—LARRY LEVIS

Blood stranger,

we never met: you died so far away

that here the moment

hasn’t passed.

An alien moon

rises.  Hearing

birdsong in the forests of the dead

you pin it

in your mind’s