All Heathens

Chan’s skillful debut is a lustrous collage of first-person, persona, and epistle poems populated with Filipino holiday reenactments, Catholic saints, karaoke, a chorus of family members, and the dead who insist on return and whose memory drives the speaker to seek a world beyond the colonialist history of her home country. Stories of the early movement of Italian conquistadors—in particular Antonio Pigafetta, Magellan’s scribe and world circumnavigator—become a mirror for the speaker’s own global migrations and investigation of her native language, Bisaya. “You were a tourist, Tony, and now so are we,” she writes. The roving speaker of these poems attempts to reclaim a white man’s translation of a “heathen” tongue as a means to her family’s origin story, as well as to memory itself. Her repeated return to trying “to remember the Bisaya word for remember,” an absence of language experienced as a void, finds resolution. “I’m writing this down,/ like Pigafetta, alongside his list of words, all of them ours, all of them/ heathen,” she says. This debut tenderly articulates the intersection of cultural history, the loneliness of migration, and the generosity of familial love. (Mar.)