
Lifeboat
2015
First Published
4.07
Average Rating
109
Number of Pages
Kristine Ong Muslim’s haunting collection, Lifeboat, solidifies Muslim’s reputation as a poet of loss, of absence. In “The Alchemical Stages,” the speaker invites readers to enter one of the most brilliant poetic minds writing today, “Here is disillusionment. Here is isolation. Peer inside its shell. Then tell us what you see ...” In the poem “Twilight does not grow overnight,” she writes that, “The coroner, who must’ve seen it all, / …does not avert his gaze from a spot / on the floor as if he is waiting / for a love poem to materialize / under the stainless steel table.” Muslim finds beauty in the most unlikely of places and creates a world unimagined since the time of the surrealists.
- Shaindel Beers, author of A Brief History of Time and The Children’s War and Other Poems The often surreal, always sharp poems in Lifeboat accumulate to a haunting whole. Here, among destruction, “the children in my town chose names / for their favorite colors.” Hope, like imperfect light, finds the cracks: “Love is that mute and shapely device / that cannot teach, that only lives in / houses with crooked teeth.” A fine, transformative collection.
- Nick Ripatrazone, author of Ember Days, We Will Listen For You, Good People, and many other books
Avg Rating
4.07
Number of Ratings
14
5 STARS
43%
4 STARS
21%
3 STARS
36%
2 STARS
0%
1 STARS
0%
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Author

Kristine Ong Muslim
Author · 7 books
Kristine Ong Muslim is the author of The Drone Outside (Eibonvale Press, 2017), Black Arcadia (University of the Philippines Press, 2017), Meditations of a Beast (Cornerstone Press, 2016), Butterfly Dream (Snuggly Books, 2016), Age of Blight (Unnamed Press, 2016), and several other books of fiction and poetry. She co-edited numerous anthologies of fiction, including Destination: SEA 2050 A.D. (Penguin Random House SEA, 2022), Ulirát: Best Contemporary Stories in Translation from the Philippines (Gaudy Boy, 2021), and the British Fantasy Award-winning People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction! (2016). Her translation of Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III’s novel, Book of the Damned, won a 2023 PEN/Heim grant. She is also the translator of nine books by Filipino authors Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles, Rogelio Braga, and Marlon Hacla. Widely anthologized, Muslim’s short stories were published in Conjunctions, Dazed, and World Literature Today and translated into Bulgarian, Czech, German, Japanese, Polish, and Serbian. She lives in a small farmhouse in Sitio Magutay, a remote rural highland area in Maguindanao, Philippines.