Pisces Urges

By Czaerra Galicinao Ucol

Czaerra Galicinao Ucol blends emotion, wit, and water sign wisdom in their debut collection, Pisces Urges. They reckon with the hard-earned blessing of being known, the tumult of friendship in all of its forms, and the universal truth that the love found in community is water, deep as any. With praise that echoes like a prayer, Galicina

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sampaguita Press LLC
• Release date: Sep 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9798985771299

Book preview

Further Praise for

PISCES URGES

"How I wept as I made my way through these poems. They held my hand through the stinging rubble of friendships broken apart, the grief fog of the pandemic’s epicenter, the persistent ache of dreams interrupted. Pisces Urges peels back the layers of armor we are wrapped in to allow for us to open ourselves to the raw edges of our hurt. Galicinao Ucol shows us that it is ok to break open, to cry, to ready ourselves for the healing that will follow. Pisces Urges leads through the chrysalis of growing into yourself, a reminder that the hardest things are possible with friends and chosen family by our side."

—CHRISTIAN ALDANA, author of The Water We Swim In

Through a capacious interiority of lyric, from the rot and raw and yearning of Filipinx diasporic love and memory, in forms playfully reminding us that we are worthy of the sad, the never-made teen movie, the celebratory, in a Chicago suburb, at the shores of Lake Michigan, in a New York apartment, deep in The Digital Sala, at the gravesite of our beloved Tito Carlos Bulosan, blossoms so quietly, mindfully, bitingly, and lovingly these queer thrift-store potluck poetics to keep us company, to keep our futures fed with rambutan and baon...and more baon.

—JASON MAGABO PEREZ, San Diego Poet Laureate, author of This is for the mostless

"Czaerra Galicinao Ucol’s Pisces Urges is a sensitive and necessary register of what it means to locate oneself in the world. Here, we see explorations of Filipinx personhood, gender, place, and the joy of being held by one’s community. Full of love and yearning, Pisces Urges is an ode to the hard work of living and a beautiful celebration of becoming."

—CATHY LINH CHE, author of Split

"Like a bushel of rambutans, Czaerra Galicinao Ucol’s poems are swirls of wildness housing tender pearls of truth. In the growing realm of the Filipinx diaspora, Ucol’s speaker draws back the curtains of AAPI exceptionalism to reveal inequities and inconsolable aches rippling from the shores of Lake Michigan to the corner store in Queens. Wielding a bright torch of cultural memory, their poems culminate in a victorious battle cry urging us to add ‘extra Ilocano vinegar,’ crack open a Red Horse, belt our fav tracks at