"Epal," is Filipino slang for an annoying or attention seeking person, which is the theme of this interval collection of poems in English, Tagalog, and Taglish on realities overheard or overenunciated. From the author of the prizewinning poetry collection "Jolography." 

"Doing what he does best and what only he can, the poet throws creative chaos in the air, as always, and waves it like he just doesn’t care. He then catches the mayhem with sharp wit and jagged words, blindfolded, and sprinkles the slivers of beauty on paper. Jolographer than ever, Manalo’s latest literary toknenengs are just as good I almost feel honored that he’s also known as the poemer Bob Ong. GIF smiley." - Bob Ong

In this debut poetry collection from Michael Balili scenes, landscapes, and contrived interventions are illuminated by a flash of lightning. Velocirupture: the velocity of rupture, an urgency; the rupture of velocity, a delay. Surely the everyday asks to be interrupted?

"Velocirupture’s startling juxtapositions and figurations of free-range absurdity and tenderness mark Michael Balili as a troubadour of our troubled times." - Caroline Hau

In this new poetry collection, Paolo Manalo explores the themes of love and satisfying endings with the same linguistic inventiveness of his previous work, "Jolography". Some of these poems are obsessions with lovers, kisses, and flowers; and the repetition of lines from movies, songs, and video games. It seeks closure through formal skill, and when there is none, comfort in the ek-ek of the imagination. 

"So close to romance I almost feel I was led on. But those endings. and some beginnings, and middles. Not romance, but there's a lot of winking, which on some days is more than enough." - Mina V. Esguerra

"Reading the poems of Paolo Manalo is to be happily ensnared in a web where ek-ek and insight meet." - Jonathan Chua

Part pre-show scat, part pre-guillotine prayer. Half-logorrhea, half-rhapsody. When you leaf through Decroux Men, you leaf through improbable back stories to great works of art: from Michael Jackson’s moonwalking to John Coltrane’s "A Love Supreme"; from Francisco Tárrega’s “Recuerdos de la Alhambra” to a waitress giving cocktails Gertrude Stein-inspired names. The guesswork is mimed by an omniscient (though not necessarily helpful) narrator, lending a muteness which Anne Carson posits in "Nox" as not being synonymous with silence but symptomatic of man’s “fundamental opacity.” The poems in this brief collection are attempts, in effect, to puncture holes through that very impenetrability. 

"Aldus Santos draws connective lines that cut through the haze of disparate histories and contrasting textures, distilling concurrent threads of music and performance into elegantly sparse pockets of resplendent details hewn from the past and the present. "Decroux Men" collects odes to the everyday, musings on major and minor triumphs and failures, and speculations on the recurrence of ideas throughout an unexpected series of spaces and places, producing a singular, contemplative cadence with an immense yet silent gravitational force. The gaps, the pauses charge each utterance with significance, with an entrancing rhythm that pulls inward and pushes outward intoned by a voice that contains multitudes." —Itos Ledesma

Ang "Harinawa" ay piling mga tulang naisulat sa loob ng dalawampung taon pakatapos mailabas ang "Libro ng Pobya," ang unang aklat ng makata. Sa munting koleksiyon na ito ikinuyom ang dambuhalang mga usaping tumutukoy sa ating nakakabagabag na karanasan ng pagkakalagak bilang isang kaluluwang eternal sa maselang katawang tiyak na ang katapusan. 

"May taimtim na panalangin ng pagpapatuloy at mabalasik na pag-asam sa papausbong pa lamang na katubusan sa Harinawa ni Jaime Jesus Borlagdan. Tila tahimik ngunit makapangyarihang mga responsaryo ang mga tula sa harap ng mga nakikita at nararanasan sa ating Ngayon-at-Dito. Mapanlinlang ang direktang retorika ng mga linya ngunit lagi’t laging pinagliliwanag ng mga butil ng tayutay na parang mga “piraso ng nakahihiwang kislap.” Manimdim lagi ang nakikita sa kasalukuyan ngunit naidadala ng mga taludtod ang mambabasa sa isang lugar “kung saan ang kalinawan ay nagaganap,/ sumisikat bilang libu-libong umaga.” Isang mahusay na pagpapakilala ang Harinawa sa katangi-tanging tinig ni Borlagdan bilang tunay na kontemporanyong makata." -Carlos Piocos III

Here are objects in search of a subject through a lenticular view, as though giving the moment a slight wiggle or a sudden wink. Written in verse paragraphs, Tilt Cards asks if such moments are accretions of disparate fragments of experience that acquire larger meaning in afterthought after afterhtought. From the author of the prizewinning poetry collection Maybe Something.

"Very playful, very cryptic, but also very revealing, these carefully assembled fragments freeze time and free time by extending tendrils of continuity into the ever-fluid present. A fascinating chapbook, amusing, but also very sad at some points." -Maria Rhodora Ancheta 

"Shifting from image to seemingly random image to epiphany, Tilt Cards reads like a haiku." -Lily Rose Tope

This new chapbook collection is a pilgrimage to Han-shan's Cold Mountain in the hermetic terrain and almost zen pandemicon of Paolo Manalo’s elegaic adjustments to a life changed by the Covid-19 outbreak of 2020. Written during the lockdown using a process of "arrival by avoidance", Posthumous are poems that anticipate death, kindness, survival. 

"Paolo's poetry is cutting and truthful at the same time. In two languages but which captures bodily experiences unexpressed even multilingually. Realizations jolt you, pain and joy come unannounced in unexpected places." -Ruanni Tupas

Here are a scatter of ekphrastic poems and other meditations on love and time passing. 

“Hollowing out in words the spaces of, not loss exactly, but of its shadow, these poetic reckonings resonate in the piercing silence of all loss leaves behind. Elegiac, yet distilled, they speak of and from the afterlives of passion and pain and display a confidence and maturity arrived at only after both love and time have strayed.”—Judy Ick

Captor explores the hypersexualization, commodification, and violence inflicted upon Asian femininity. As conversations around intersectionality, feminism, and decolonization continue to evolve, this book emerges as a crucial text for understanding how bodies are policed, fetishized, and controlled within oppressive systems.

With its fearless engagement with language and form, this collection cements Lacanilao Arnould’s place as one of the most urgent poetic voices of our time—a writer, who not only witnesses, but also reimagines the possibilities of literature in an era of rupture and reckoning.

“I had to put down Captor several times just to breathe. Like the female personas assaulted & raped, the retraumatizing happens in the retelling, yet in each retelling, in the exacting forms of a poet who shirks away from hiding in metaphor, there is recovery, ablution. This collection does not merely wrestle away the narrative from its oppressors, it reclaims what was once captured: breath, language, body, compelling us to see how fleeting the colonizer’s power, while the woman’s—the writer’szis lived in, lived through, endures.” —Vyxz Vasquez

In this groundbreaking collection, Aylli Cortez maps the uneasy work of becoming, where the body is at once question & guide. Blending raw confession with cultural pastiche & the surreal to explore self-discovery, body discomfort, & the search for belonging. Through vivid imagery & sharp, questioning turns, these poems evoke longing & the challenge of defining oneself amid competing expectations.

"Unabandon is a powerful debut collection by Aylli Cortez, a transmasc Filipino poet whose work traces the body’s journey toward wholeness & recognition. These poems inhabit the charged space between self-discovery & the fraught dance of self-perception & visibility, rendered through the majestic somatic rituals of edifications. At its heart is the radical act of unabandoning the self—to return, to reclaim, to stay. Here, Tboy swag rises into the monumental labor of reshaping reality, navigating longing & precarious healing as the speaker confronts intimacy, risk, & the luminous horizon of transgender possibility—where “the sun proves actual” & “soon better will feel like a burning dream.” -Michael Balili

This debut collection responds to Allen Grossmans “bitter logic” of the poetic principle, confronting poetrys limits as it reaches for the human: its failures of address, its impulse to preserve what inevitably slips away. These poems move within that tension, asking how a self can be held even as it changes in the very act of being named. Jan Dennis Destajo probes personhood in poetry—how a voice is formed, framed, and sometimes undone by its own language.

"Here are poems that inhabit and illuminate the overlapping spaces of poetry and architecture, "that good middle"--a rivetingly good middle-from which to re-view the engineering and design, the gossip and actual criticism on the precise yet imprecise nature and function of art." -Isabela Banzon

Sa isang mapang-akit na chapbook, sinisiyasat ni Ella Hermonio ang masalimuot at mahiwagang ugnayan ng pusa at pagkatao. 

"Labinlimang tula tungkol sa pusa at pagkatao itong isa sa tatlong aming napili para sa Gacha Chapbook Contest. Kahanga-hanga ang liksi ng imahinasyon ni Ella Hermonio sa pagninilay sa anyo at tunog ng tula. May lambing sa kanyang paglalaro na hindi nakakasawa sa pag-uulit ng paksa. Ito baga'y pag-ibig! NGIYAW!" - Paolo Manalo