The Landscape Does Not Sit Willingly, is a short collection of poems tackling how the world, especially capitalist or imperial metropoles, views the Philippines and Filipinos, and in turn how do we imagine our place in the world. The first section discusses various media from manifold origins depicting an idea of a people; an album from Filipino-American War, dispute regarding garbage sent from Canada, a coming-of-age film from Singapore about a beloved nanny. Meanwhile the next section, pays close attention to experiences of a changing topography of a nation. Events taken as inevitable, or even a step towards progress, are reconsidered to lay bare the uneven terrain of collective fate.
The work of the Jamaican poet Kei Miller has been hugely influential in preparing this chapbook, hence I decided to use a line from What the Mapmaker Ought to Know as a title. The cover is designed by To Torres, who I also collaborated in Mga Migranteng Sandali, and is rendered from a photo by Frank Tennyson Neely.
Limited print copies of the chapbook in available for this year’s edition of the Iloilo Mega Book Fair. Digital version available for download here.