Books
Winner, 2009
Ernest Sandeen Prize Series in Poetry
University of Notre Dame Press
The poems in Juan Luna’s Revolver both address history and attempt to transcend it through their exploration of the complexity of diaspora. Attending to the legacy of colonial and postcolonial encounters, Luisa A. Igloria has crafted poems that create links of sympathetic human understanding, even as they revisit difficult histories and pose necessary questions about place, power, displacement, nostalgia, beauty, and human resilience in conditions of alienation and duress.
Igloria traces journeys made by Filipinos in the global diaspora that began since the encounter with European and American colonial powers. Her poems allude to historical figures such as the Filipino painter Juan Luna, the novelist and national hero José Rizal, as well as the eleven hundred indigenous Filipinos brought to serve as live exhibits in the 1904 Missouri World’s Fair. The image of the revolver fired by Juan Luna reverberates throughout this collection, raising to high relief how separation and exile have shaped concepts of identity, nationality, and possibility.
Suffused with gorgeous imagery and nuanced emotion, Igloria’s poetry achieves an intimacy fostered by gem-like phrases set within a politically-charged context speaking both to the personal and the collective.
Luisa A. Igloria is a tenured professor and the Director of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University. The winner of numerous national and international creative writing awards, she is the author of nine other books.
OTHER BOOKS BY LUISA IGLORIA [Click on the Book Covers for more information.]
Luisa Igloria’s work also appears in the following anthologies: [Click on the Book Covers for more information.]
