Names Above Houses

by Oliver de la Paz

Overview

In Names above Houses, Oliver de la Pazuses both prose and verse poems to create the magical realm of Fidelito Recto—a boy who wants to fly—and his family of Filipino immigrants. Fidelito’s mother, Maria Elena, tries to keep her son grounded while struggling with her own moorings. Meanwhile, Domingo, Fidelito's fisherman father, is always at sea, even when among them. From the archipelago of the Philippines to San Francisco, horizontal and vertical movements shape moments of displacement and belonging for this marginalized family. Fidelito approaches life with a sense of wonder, finding magic in the mundane and becoming increasingly uncertain whether he is in the sky or whether his feet are planted firmly on the ground.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809390205
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	04/11/2001
Series:	Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	534 KB

About the Author

Oliver de la Paz was born in Manila and raised in Ontario, Oregon. He has served as the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College and currently teaches at Arizona State University, where he received his M.F.A. in creative writing. His poems have appeared in the Literary Review, Quarterly West, Third Coast, and Asian Pacific American Review and in the anthology Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Literature.

Table of Contents

Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Acknowledgments One In the Year of the Rat The Romance of Bait At Sea Domingo Learned to Steady His Hand Insects in Maria Elena’s Kitchen The Flood of Ants A Parable Before Takeoff, Fidelito Prays Fidelito Sails over Manila On His First Flight Over Fidelito Haunts Airports On the Downward Escalator Manong Jose, While Cleaning His Last Window Before Coffee, Sees Fidelito and Is Pleased Though Wary Fidelito Prays to the Wind, Asking for Advice, but Not Really Asking Two School Years When Fidelito Is the New Boy at School Why Maria Elena Calls the Boy’s Name So Many Times in a Day Fidelito Takes Flight up a Ladder For Hours, Fidelito Hangs from the Topmost Branch Before Letting Go She Leaves the Water Running Fidelito Suddenly Becomes Afraid of Heights From the Ocean, Fidelito Pulls The Fisherman’s Chronicle Grounding In Sleep He Practices Flying Three Madonnas The Fourth Madonna Carpenter Ants From a Country with One Million Marias A Cupboard Full of Halos Fidelito Dreams the Village Domingo, Too Old for Fishing The Romance of the Television When Fidelito Says He’ll Fly Away Domingo’s Advice for Fidelito Nine Secrets the Recto Family Can’t Tell the Boy Origami Dove Manong Jose Remembers Fidelito’s First Fall Fidelito Contemplates How Powerful He Has Become and Thinks of Ways to Alter Weather Patterns Three Mind-Swimming After the Boy Goes to Bed Domingo’s Blood Clot The Romance of the Amputated Leg How Domingo Disappears In the Dream with Blue Snow The Death of Domingo Recto What Fidelito Knows of His Father Maria Elena Puts His Good Shoes Away What the Kitchen Was The Way the Blessed Mourn Earth and Sky Birds and Their Various Fevers A Plan to Control the Weather Under the Stained Glass Saints The Puzzle of Kites The Box of Stars What the Laundry Told Maria Elena Wren Jealousies An Anatomy of Birds Manong Jose Discusses How the Boy and His Strangeness Grew into His Name When Fidelito Grows Up, Maria Elena Reads With the Grace of Basket Weavers Fidelito Speaks of One Evening at the Turn of a Century but Mentions No Particular Century Other Books in the Series Back Cover

Editorial Reviews

Oliver de la Paz has created a unique work: a novella in the form of a sequence of prose poems; a lucidly inventive allegory of migration, exile, and belonging. With grace and elegance, he evokes the magical, myth-making culture of his Philippines and brings it to a very real California in the person of Fidelito, a boy who wants to fly, and his parents, Domingo and Maria Elena. Oliver de la Paz has the strength and wisdom to step lightly with the heaviest burdens. He is stunningly good. Names above Houses celebrates the trials and indestructibility of a family and is a durable refreshment, an essential document of life at the cultural crossroads.”—Rodney Jones, author of Elegy for the Southern Drawl



“Oliver de la Paz creates the legend of Fidelito—a boy whose yearning to fly becomes a metaphor for immigration, sexual awakening, religious passion, and the imagination of a poet-in-the-making. As Fidelito's family trades Filipino omens of baby teeth and rats for those of the ‘moonlike glow’ of American television romances and San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, de la Paz's deft storytelling—part magic realism, part Aesop fable—seamlessly pulls us from one adventure to the next. Through Fidelito, de la Paz weaves the odysseys of Jesus and Icarus into a lush and wonderful wanderlust.”—Denise Duhamel, author of The Star-Spangled Banner



“Names above Houses points to a new direction in Asian American poetry in which the creative genius of Oliver de la Paz hangs in the sky as luminous neon verse. He takes the urbane colors of John Berryman and mixes them with the sensuous hues of Arthur Sze. This is a book enriched with unexpected shifts of language, vertical and horizontal perspectives, and a full spectrum of emotion and insight.”—Nick Carbó, author of Secret Asian Man

From the Publisher