Aimee Suzara's second full-length book Birth Language centers on a Filipina-American time traveling through her history, twisted and haunted like the roots of a balete tree.
The book fuses English, Spanish, and Tagalog. It employs archival texts from as early as the 1500s when European conquistadors and explorers encountered the pre-colonial Philippine islands. Guided by the babaylan (shaman) and populated by mythical creatures like the mananneansal kapre, and sireno, the collection celebrates a history of resistance, reclaiming and redefining the self despite colonization, assimilation, and cultural loss.
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Suzara has the rare gift of being able to craft work that is multilingual, hybrid, environmental, and deeply political. Throughout, she praises the acts of birth and languaging, home and healing.
—Craig Santos Perez, author of National Book Award-winning From Unincorporated Territory [åmot]
The hunger, breath, taste, and thrill of these inquisitive poems of the tongue simply engulf the reader. A passionate read, a pleasure!
—Heid E. Erdrich, author of Verb Animate and National Poetry Series winner Little Big Bully
Birth Language is visionary and transcendent, the voice of a master lyricist and storyteller. The Filipina American speaker confronts colonial history and the "inner-colonized and inner-colonizer," while experiencing rituals, mythic spirits, and motherhood.
—Lee Herrick, California Poet Laureate and author of In Praise of Late Wonder and Scar and Flower
What a gorgeous collection of poetry Aimee Suzara’s birth language is—creation story that is intertextual, linguistically rigorous and precise, historical, deeply, deeply personal and vulnerable. She grounds herself in old belief and birth, both bloody and beautiful.
—Barbara Jane Reyes, Author of Invocation to Daughters and Letters to a Young Brown Girl
