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All the Words I Can Remember Are Poems book cover
All the Words I Can Remember Are Poems
2025
First Published
4.83
Average Rating
96
Number of Pages

Winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets All The Words I Can Remember Are Poems challenges colonized ideas of history and truth, particularly in relation to Filipinx/a/o history and its colonization by the United States. Engaging with archival materials and playing with the sounds of remembered words and their unique associations, Michelle Peñaloza confronts violent and ironic tensions within historical narratives, subverting erasure and creating her own cultural fluency that speaks to growing up in diaspora and the complexities of identity, motherhood, and the transmission of love across generations. The expression and reception of love between parent and child, particularly Filipinx/a mothers and daughters, becomes its own translation, a generational game of telephone across time and space. In conversation with the history of US imperialism and the broader implications of colonization, this book embraces the impotence of revision, the power of the always-reaching―what wisdom and connection we find there. 10 collages by the author accompany the poems

Avg Rating
4.83
Number of Ratings
12
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Author

Michelle Penalosa
Michelle Penalosa
Author · 4 books
Michelle Peñaloza is author of two chapbooks, landscape/heartbreak (Two Sylvias, 2015), and Last Night I Dreamt of Volcanoes (Organic Weapon Arts, 2015). Her full-length collection, Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire, which recently won the 2018 Hillary Gravendyk National Poetry Prize, will be published in Fall 2019 . Her work can be found in Prairie Schooner, upstreet, Vinyl, and The Collagist, with poems forthcoming in The Normal School and Third Coast. Michelle is a Kundiman fellow, and a former Made at Hugo House Fellow. She is the recent recipient of the 2019 Scotti Merrill Emerging Writer Award for Poetry from The Key West Literary Seminar, as well as scholarships from VONA Voices and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, among others. Michelle lives in rural Northern California.
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