Birthmark

by Jon Marcelino Pineda MFA

Overview

In Jon Pineda’s debut collection Birthmark, loss takes the shape of a scar, memory the shape of a childhood, and identity the shape of a birthmark on a lover’s thigh. Like water taking the form of its container, Pineda’s poems swell to fill the lines of his experiences. Against the backdrop of Tidewater, Virginia’s crabs and cicadas, Pineda invokes his mestizo—the Tagalog word for being half Filipino—childhood, weaving laments for a tenuous paternal relationship and the loss of a sibling. Channeling these fragmented memories into a new discovery of self, Birthmark reclaims an identity, delicate yet unrelenting, with plaintive tones marked equally by pain, reflection, and redemption.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809325702
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	03/11/2004
Series:	Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Jon Pineda was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and raised in Tidewater, Virginia. He studied in the MFA program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University and has received a grant from the Virginia Commission for the Arts. His poetry has appeared in Many Mountains Moving, the Asian Pacific American Journal, Puerto del Sol, and other publications. He lives in Norfolk, Virginia, with his wife, Amy.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	xi
1.	Half
	Matamis	3
	Wrestling	4
	Memory in the Shape of a Swimming Lesson	5
	Visitation, or How a Son Came to Resemble the Archangel	10
	Arboretum	11
	The Metaphor of Sunlight Can Be Carried in a Bucket	12
	A Shadow of Gulls	13
	The Muse, or Stars Out on Interstate 81 South	14
	Willoughby Spit	15
2.	Door That Always Opens
	Between Rounds	19
	Memory in the Shape of a House Made of Doors	27
	Shelter	28
	Black Sea Bass	29
	Birthmark	30
3.	Inevitable Distance
	Miscarriage	33
	Five about Flowers	34
	Corolla	39
	Hunger	40
	A Few Words on Rome, or The Neighbor Who Never Waves	41
	Weight	46
	Bonfire	47
	Night Feeding	48
4.	Undoing
	Living Together	51
	In Strange Circles	52
	Translation	53
	In the Romance of Grief	55
	This Poetry	60

Editorial Reviews

"Birthmark by Jon Pineda, Southern Illinois, 2004, 64p, paper $14.95 • Jon Pineda's poems plumb the complex relationship between a Filipino father and a son who is hapa, "half  a mestizo," a "'half-breed." For example, in a poem where the father is teaching his son to swim, "There are only so many words he uses, some in English & some / in Tagalog, & the boy, flailing his arms to stay afloat, understands none of them." Their mute connections are through masculine rituals: fishing, boxing (your hand lifted mine above my head / as if I had or maybe we had won / . . survived another night / in the long history of fathers & sons"), the tortured stories of war and military service. Pineda's craft subtly underscores being "hair "the whiteness of the barrier island: a squat light- / house in the center of the neighborhood, the occasional white- / caps disappearing"; note how he juxtaposes "whiteness" to "barrier", and how "light" and "white" are hyphenated, both techniques suggesting emotional distance and separation. A bravura debut book." —Vince Gotera, North American Review

North American Review - Vince Gotera

With the publication of his first book, Jon Pineda shows himself to be one of the premier poets of Asian American literature. This stunning and beautiful collection delivers a strong message: This poet loves the sheer act of creating poems and discovering universal truths that begin in a specific culture but extend beyond broken and triumphant horizons.”—The Bloomsbury Review

From the Publisher