Birthmark

by Jon Marcelino Pineda

Overview

In Jon Pineda’s debut collection Birthmark, loss takes the shape of a scar, memory the shape of a childhood, and identity the shape of a birthmark on a lover’s thigh. Like water taking the form of its container, Pineda’s poems swell to fill the lines of his experiences. Against the backdrop of Tidewater, Virginia’s crabs and cicadas, Pineda invokes his mestizo—the Tagalog word for being half Filipino—childhood, weaving laments for a tenuous paternal relationship and the loss of a sibling. Channeling these fragmented memories into a new discovery of self, Birthmark reclaims an identity, delicate yet unrelenting, with plaintive tones marked equally by pain, reflection, and redemption.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809388615
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	03/11/2004
Series:	Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
File size:	180 KB

About the Author

Jon Pineda was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and raised in Tidewater, Virginia. He studied in the MFA program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University and has received a grant from the Virginia Commission for the Arts. His poetry has appeared in Many Mountains Moving, the Asian Pacific American Journal, Puerto del Sol, and other publications. He lives in Norfolk, Virginia, with his wife, Amy.

Table of Contents

Contents Acknowledgments 00 1. Half Matamis 00 Wrestling 00 Memory in the Shape of a Swimming Lesson 00 Visitation, or How a Son Came to Resemble the Archangel 00 Arboretum 00 The Metaphor of Sunlight Can Be Carried in a Bucket 00 A Shadow of Gulls 00 The Muse, or Stars Out on Interstate 81 South 00 Willoughby Spit 00 2. Door That Always Opens Between Rounds 00 Memory in the Shape of a House Made of Doors 00 Shelter 00 Black Sea Bass 00 Birthmark 00 3. Inevitable Distance Miscarriage 00 Five about Flowers 00 Corolla 00 Hunger 00 A Few Words on Rome, or The Neighbor Who Never Waves 00 Weight 00 Bonfire 00 Night Feeding 00 4. Undoing Living Together 00 In Strange Circles 00 Translation 00 In the Romance of Grief 00 This Poetry 00

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