Birth Language

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 mananngangal, kapre, and sireno, the collection celebrates a history of resistance, reclaiming and redefining the self despite colonization, assimilation, and cultural loss.

ADVANCED PRAISE

“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. Her poetic voice is unwavering, a diasporic daughter talking back to colonial power sharp and unflinching, talking to the precious and willful child she births, “furious butterfly, / thrum of a colibrí,” talking to her mythopoetic motherbody, and talking to and of the spirits. She is a foreign-born balikbayan, and she is sirena and aswang—what a satisfying poetics of hunger and possibility.”
—Barbara Jane Reyes, author of Invocation to Daughters and Letters to a Young Brown Girl

“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. Suzara writes, “Your inheritance is dilution. It is up to you to go back to the sources.” These poems are deep excavation work. The effect is liberatory.”
—Lee Herrick, California Poet Laureate and author of In Praise of Late Wonder and Scar and Flower

“Aimee Suzara’s highly anticipated new collection dives into the themes of culture, history, and motherhood. Through poetic song, chant, and rituals, these poems suture the fragments of family memory, the history and folklore of the Philippines, and the experiences of migration and diaspora. 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

“Birth Language glories in introducing multiple languages into English so we listen closely and expand our hearing. Suzara’s ecstatic book builds in movements of increasing scope so we hear orchestra and opera all along. The hunger, breath, taste, and trill of these inquisitive poems of the tongue simply engulf the reader. A passionate read, a pleasure!”
—Heid Erdrich, author of Verb Animate and National Poetry Series winner Little Big Bully