God's Will For Monsters (hillary Gravendyk Prize) [Paperback]

In many ways Rachelle Cruz, here, contests, demolishes and remixes the bizarre, early 20th Century colonial and classic ethnographic summations of the Philippines, of its peoples and culture, those without history - with her incredible, leaping, elegant, multi-form, cinematic, forest of word-magic. The food, the body, the islands, the crossings, the colonial montage, the Renaissance in reverse, Imelda Marcos and her gallery of humanless shoes, the mother, the daughter, money order transactions, and early school days of cultural slippage--as Renato Rosaldo, one of the few anthropologists to dismantle the colonial dis- guring of the Ilongot of Luzon, Northern Philippines, Cruz creates a hurricane masterpiece of anti-ethnographies of scenes, moments and artifacts, of cultural realignments. Who is the monster now? An award winner non-stop, a deeply serious, studied set of investigations, yet, playful, a Tumbler of blurred faces, light, time, space, paint, medicine, plants and plates at the hands of a spiritcaller- writer, word-levitator of the 21st Century. One of a kind. --Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States

Per the Latin root 'monstrare', the monster's charge is 'to show' us what we can't see on our own. Rachelle Cruz clearly knows this. And with God's Will for Monsters, the poet conjures dreamspace, incantation, oral history, myth, remittance slip, aswang bulletin, greenbacks, Christ spells, and personal memory. The result is a new-century revelation of so much glorious giggling grotesque culled from our hidden narratives. It makes sense to me that a Pinay poet should offer us such a book, both cerebral and sensual, that documents the astonishing proximity of our horror and hallelujah. --Patrick Rosal, Author of Brooklyn Antidiluvian

More than ever, our world needs the aswang, the werebeast, and the wisdom of the women and bold voices calling out from Rachelle Cruz's marvelous debut collection. Cruz's vision holds many worlC0