“A wondrous, fierce braiding of history, authority, and rebellious art. Merina’s poetic voice summons a necessary dignity for oppressed peoples of the past, bringing this balm of a book to our haunted present.”
—Laurel Flores Fantauzzo, author of The First Impulse
Out now from the University of the Philippines Press!
“In this luminous collection of poems, Dorian Merina invites us to sift through the colonial archives to discover who we were before conquest. With each line, he draws us into a journey not toward certainty but toward the unsettling truths buried in silence and omission.”
—SHEILA S. CORONEL, co-founder of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism
“yndio arxipelago is a dazzling provocation drawing readers into the intimacies of the first colonial encounters between the Philippines and an emerging Spanish-speaking world…[Merina’s] verses, crisp and riveting, allow us to listen in to historical conversations, experience a scriptworld shifting from the baybayin to Castilian, and share in the internal struggles of a people on the brink of a cultural upheaval.”
—MARLON JAMES SALES, Associate Professor of Spanish, University of the Philippines and Secretary of The Society for Early Transpacific Studies
View and purchase the book via UP Press.
CREDIT: The header image on this page is from the beautiful artwork of José Honorato Lozano, one of his mid-19th Century paintings depicting Ivatan fishermen.
Dorian Merina 