Latern Review - the journal of "Asian American Poetry Unbound" - reviews Barbara Jane Reyes' Diwata for their December 20 blog: "In Poeta in San Francisco, Barbara Jane Reyes’ previous book, diwata was someone “elders say” had once “walked on earth” before the “the nailed god came” (30). These are the traces and rumors from which the titular Diwata of her latest book is resurrected. Then, like slippery oral art, like slips of the tongue, creation stories about men, women, and diwata—a god or spirit in Philippine mythology—are made up and told again and again. The poems in Diwata draw also on, and retell, Judeo-Christian creation narratives, introduced and enforced in the Philippines by the Spanish colonial regime. These retellings of myths and folk tales become a modality through which ahistory is rendered into history, history itself is investigated, and variations of diwatas, their quarries, and their hunters are revealed as inhabiting multiple narrative, linguistic, and cultural sites." Read the whole review here [Lantern Review on Diwata] [caption id="attachment_977" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Barbara Jane Reyes. BOA poet."][/caption]