Books | Angela Penaredondo

A lyrical, textual amalgamation that conjures queer divination and alchemy as a language of defiance against military driven economies and western patriarchy.

Angela Peñaredondo’s nature felt but never apprehended synthesizes poetry, lyric prose, fragmented creative nonfiction, and visual art. They voyage through the junctures of gender and environmental injustices, and its connections between Philippines’ histories of foreign invasions and intimacies of survivorhood. Peñaredondo wields queer, diasporic mythmaking, affective experiences of ritual and prayer as an illuminating force in the tangles of intergenerational memory.

Praises

These poems tenderly excavate a queer Filipinx history on which to build a beautifully imagined queer Filipinx future. nature felt but never apprehended is sensual and attuned to the more-than-human world and its abundant queer ecologies. In one of many refusals to be gaslit by late capitalism and the legacies of empire. Peñaredondo writes “film the police.” Through multiple modalities, languages, and histories, Peñaredondo’s impressive poetics imagine the innovative survival of a liberated diaspora."

—Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

Angela Peñaredondo is a profoundly imaginative and subversive writer. Through queer choreographies and archipelagic poetics, she/they excavate(s) archives, unmakes maps, and inscribes mythologies. While this book can be read/felt as a “topography of survival,” it escapes total apprehension with “polyphonic quiver.

—Craig Santos Perez

In nature felt but never apprehended, Angela Peñaredondo portrays the worst of human legacy with nature, despite its glory, becoming collateral damage in human wars...The poems arise from the “wonderment of bones splayed out... across an eroded altar.” Even a steely word like “geometry” can’t hold it together and frays into “geo me try." That this collection's wisdom is accented by the Filipino/x experience makes its lessons more powerful, thus devastating. But the poems also heighten understanding, hopefully on our way to help “hope” avoid a fate as mere “fossil.”

—Eileen Tabios

[W]hat do you do when all your parts bring fire,” asks Angela Peñaredondo’s Nature Felt but Never Apprehended. Without answering, this book is fire’s answer. When I say it is brilliant, a word I’m invoking for its hexagonal history and accuracy, I mean it is a book that is sharp while it shines; it is a turning and it is wise; it is a book to see more of the world (its histories and imaginations, its futures and its possible repair) through. If “someone/made you believe/mouth’s the limit,” come here. Experience what happens “when we allow ourselves/the final feel of our enormities.” Thank you, Angela. This book is “light singing through the only hole in the room.

—TC Tolbert

News (reviews, interviews & features)

"Intersect: Exploring the Longing" by Lisbeth Coiman on Women Who Submit

"Spaces of Affect and Enormity: Angela Peñaredondo interviewed by Simone Zapata" on MayDay Mag

Writers Recommend Series on Poets & Writers

Interview with Apparel for Authors

"Annotated Nightstand: What Natalie Eilbert is Reading Now and Next" by Diana Arterian on Lithub

"LGBTQIA Legacy in the Literary Community" by Brian Dunlap on Los Angeles Literature

Now Read This on Vagabond City Literary Journal

A Reading List for Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month 2023 on CLMP

ISBN | 9780997093216

90 pages | $15

2017 | Inlandia Institute

Cover Art : Mike Saijo and Angela Penaredondo

Cover Design: Lawrence Eby

Angela Penaredondo’s debut collection of body/migratory/incantatory poems, explores the alchemy and ritual of poetics that stem from the space of in-between or realm of intersections. These are grey zones where energies that lie opposite on the same spectrum finally collide and intermingle: the intellect and the sensual, the profane and the holy, love and violence, memory and erasure. Here, there are no geographical or cultural boundaries marked, no sides chosen, only a maneuvering through, a queering of, and a resisting to. All Things Lose Thousands of Times are feminist-oriented poems investigating where fragments of the body’s memory, culture, gender and desire gather, then piece themselves together to form into new shapes: a hybrid woman, a female assemblage, a history palimpsest, a transnational body.

Jamii Pub

Arkipelago Books

Filipina owned Bookstore

support me, queer Filipinx lit & indie presses :)

Praises

Multi-sensory voyager - sculptor of love and painter of concept and delirium, a choreographer of space and a duende-splicer between Baudelaire, Lorca and Strauss. Angela is somewhere in there, cinematic; a Casanova pin-stripe suit, then a flaring thigh, then a topaz sari. I find Peñaredondo a most accomplished poet, a devouring mind and most of all, a deep, intimate observer touching the big bright, dark worlds — their wounds and miracles. She says, "I want to be that kind / who walks through a wall of fifty lives." Indeed she possesses this kind of power. A genius at work.

—Juan Felipe Herrera, former United States Poet Laureate

The poems in All Things Lose Thousands of Times aptly tell a transnational coming of age story, a becoming from the savage and the fertile, the urban and the fantastic, where "heaven comes after collision." This is a stunning debut for Peñaredondo, poems that shimmer with dense and riveting lyricism.

—Carmen Giménez Smith

A luminous and timely book of migratory poetics that gathers in the body, no matter how impossibly marooned, the mouth of the lyric I. Drawn from the compression of loss, "…beyond the clenched doors, the perfume/ of starved flowers." Peñaredondo’s speaker seeks in the "…web of wetness, what…has been written out." The poet’s collapsing of cultural dimensions into the weight of traveling through an embodied history and present reveals an urgent landscape (of war, of art, of nature, of people) of the inevitable and the incommensurable: "I’d rather be whoever bathes/in the monsoon, knees swaying—/unequaled. Wanting allows gospel…" Peñaredondo’s truth brilliantly explores precariousness, revealing the need to move at its edges, and to escape, into "husk" and "crystalline pictograph"—"I came back not to regret/ or ask the particulars why I left./ When a tree falls, its roots/ aim jagged, pointing/ in all directions…

—Ronaldo V. Wilson

Elastic, dimensional, all-together convincing, Angela Peñaredondo’s debut All Things Lose Thousands of Times wields the language as a mountain wields a storm, in phrases that pivot, reverse, wander, tighten, leap and fall through geographies of the body, an inward archipelago of experience, individual and collective, all past and flooded, all future and on fire, bearing unflinching witness to courage, revelation and sexuality, to life and to the lives of women where "their mothers have turned into mangroves" and where "her father found us / as I knelt before her, knees / on church-cold tile." A profoundly alert and loving book that sings and celebrates the cosmic interplay of forms. This is what poetry can do. I feel rescued by it.

—Chad Sweeney

[Although, there were not many copies of this chapbook printed, this book is very personal and close to my heart. Each poem is printed in the color maroon.]

epigraph from Maroon

"I exist only / in the aftermath / of the deluge"

—Mady Schutzman

A personal examination around the various definitions of the word, maroon, this poetry chapbook is about what can thrive in place of alienation and isolation. The poems find possibilities for migration even when the self is birthed from marginalized and casted off roots. This chapbook navigates the trials of childhood, youth, family, travel, identity and sexuality as a young, API, queer woman. These are poetic stories that succumb to the ingrained need to roam while knowing there is no anchor or foothold—only the release.

Amazon

Review

ISBN | 9780991297559

40 pages | $12

2016 | Jamii Publishing

Cover Art & Design | Mike Saijo

Praises

Angela Peñaredondo’s Maroon is intoxicating. Luscious image, wholly steeped in salty sensuality, simmering fervor deftly choreographed with dizzying divinations, all tied up with slipknot presages, memory, truth – this book is a sweet copper rum, rich and ready to quench. Maroon is music, resounding, resonant slake. Drink, drink deep.

–Allison Adele Hedge Coke

The voice in this collection is irresistible: strong and lyric, tender and controlled: "I have not heard the rumble of monsoon in days / but if steam is to rise from this hot earth / then tumble, now is the time." I cannot wait to read more from this poet.

–Meg Day

Welcome to Maroon -- a mysterious island of words that is also an imagistic firecracker continually exploding before our astonished, eyes. Angela Peñaredondo’s cast adrift speaker is at times an actor, a tourist, a bemused visitor to her (un)homeland(s) and a shipwrecked child remembering family lost and recovered through the acts of traveling and remembering. The ports of call on this circuitous journey range from Manila to Havana to Kansas City to Los Angeles and beyond. But we are never lost. As we read these gorgeous poems, we travel a complex transnational space with a witty, perceptive poet, who -- like a postmodern Virgil -- leads us across a terrain at once tragic and inspiring, where we find family resemblances in the faces of strangers.

–Stephanie Barbé Hammer,

In her brilliant debut chapbook, Maroon, Angela Penaredondo writes, in an address to the sea, “I have fallen/ in love with a diver/ already dead. And you/ bring him to me?” As I read these poems, I kept thinking of Prufrock’s mermaids, his fear that they will not sing to him. In this lush, deeply inventive, musically alive collection, Penaredondo morphs into one of T.S. Eliot’s “sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown.” This is her gorgeous incantation before and after the drowning. Listen.

–Allison Benis White