2018 California Book Award Finalist
Feminist experimental poetry in the tradition of Audre Lorde and
Theresa Kyung Cha from a prominent Filipina American poet.
"Reyes writes with conviction about the various ways imperialism
transforms women into 'capital, collateral, damaged soul.' However, the
women that appear throughout the book are not merely victims; in Reyes's
radical cosmology, these women--these daughters--are rebels, saints,
revolutionaries, and torchbearers, 'sharp-tongued, willful.' This book
is a call to arms against oppressive languages, systems, and
traditions."--Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Infused with Spanish and Tagalog, Reyes's beautiful, angry verse shines
throughout. For a wide range of readers."--Library Journal, starred
review
"I cannot shout 'brilliant' loud enough. Start to this finish,
Invocation to Daughters is truth. 'I am not your ethnic spectacle. I
am not your cultural poverty. You / don't get to frame me.' This is a
book you read and teach and live."--Anthony Cody, author of
Borderland Apocrypha
Invocation to Daughters is a book of prayers, psalms, and odes for
Filipina girls and women trying to survive and make sense of their own
situations. Writing in an English inflected with Tagalog and Spanish, in
meditations on the relationship between fathers and daughters and
impassioned pleas on behalf of victims of brutality, Barbara Jane Reyes
unleashes the colonized tongue in a lyrical feminist broadside written
from a place of shared humanity.
Praise for Invocation to Daughters:
"Against violence against women, Barbara Jane Reyes rips and runs,
jumping off Audre Lorde's 'the master's tools will never dismantle the
master's house, ' Invocation to Daughters recombines
registers--prayers, pleas and elegy--braiding a trilingual
triple-threat, a 3-pronged poetics that enjambs and reconfigures the
formal with the street, utterance with erasure, the prose sentence with
the liminal. Invocation to Daughters reminds me of the 70's in the
East Bay, when Jessica Hagedorn met Ntozake Shange and ignited a green
flash seen from horizon to horizon. Barbara Jane Reyes is one of the Bay
Area's incendiary voices."--Sesshu Foster, author of ELADATL
"Invocation to Daughters is a space for multitudes, a hypnotic
collection that draws from family history--particularly the complex
cultural gendered dynamic between father and daughter--in order to
create a manual for emancipation from the interior and exterior binds
that keep us from ourselves. Through prayers, calls to actions, and
testimonies, Reyes invents 'a language so that we know ourselves, so
that we may sing, and tell, and pray.'"--Carmen Giménez Smith,
author of Be Recorder and Cruel Futures
