Santiago, Chris: Tula

Milkweed Editions (paperback, 2016)

Publisher Marketing: Tula a ruined Toltec capital; a Russian city known for its accordions; Tagalog for "poem."

Prismatic, startling, rich with meaning yet sparely composed, Chris Santiago's debut collection of poems begins with one word and transforms it, in a dazzling sleight of hand, into a multivalent symbol for the immigrant experience. Tula Santiago reveals to readers a distant land devastated by war. Tula its music beckons in rhythms, time signatures, and lullabies. Tula can the poem, he seems to ask, build an imaginative bridge back to a family lost to geography, history, and a forgotten language?

Inspired by the experiences of the "blood stranger"--the second-generation immigrant who does not fully acquire the language of his parents--Tula paints the portrait of a mythic homeland that is part ghostly underworld, part unknowable paradise. Language splinters. Impossible islands form an archipelago across its landscape. A mother sings lullabies and a father works the graveyard shift in St. Paul--while in the Philippines, two dissident uncles and a grandfather send messages and telegrams from the afterlife.

Deeply ambitious, a collection that examines the shortcomings and possibilities of both language and poetry themselves, Tula announces the arrival of a major new literary talent.