ESL Or You Weren't Here

"ESL or You Weren’t Here" tells the story of a queer Pinoy who immigrates to New York in the 1990s in order to be reunited with their parents. What follows is the poet’s awakening to the legacy of American imperialism & colonialism in the Philippines, and to the experience of living between languages, cultures, temporalities, and genders—untranslatable. ESL asks the reader to bear witness to embodied histories of forced immigration, separation and abandonment rooted in patriarchal racism. Released this month by Nightboat Books, Verse is honored to offer you this preview of Aldrin Valdez's first poetry collection. On a deep personal level, Aldrin Valdez’s debut book of poems delves into my own beautifully tortured, torturously beautiful upbringing in Manila: its wonder, humor, imagery, confusion, and nostalgia. Then, from within, its pages fan out airing the mysteries and dichotomies of a queer immigrant body, purple gendered, paradoxical. I marvel at the collection’s tangled grappling—as with the constant negotiations between Tagalog and English, the definition of motherhood—and the process of omission and possession. Being also a visual artist, Valdez is pliant, imagistic, creating collages and giving expert shapes to poems that twist and turn in their churning relocation. But through it all, at the heart of it is a pursuit of connection, of totality: “In this body,/as it meets your body, there is a rhythm/like knowing and unknowing.”—JOSEPH O. LEGASPI Aldrin Valdez’s ESL or You Weren’t Here is that rare book of poems that unfurls a story while also offering lovely, satisfying poems page by page. There is so much love here, so much tenderness, so much beauty, which doesn’t mean the book isn’t also full of grief, probing, protest, and alchemy. Valdez has written one long song I’m honored to hear.—MAGGIE NELSON