Souvenir
In this compelling debut book by Aimee Suzara, a Filipino-American woman encounters narratives of her history – from the “living exhibits” of Filipinos in the 1904 World’s Fair to the migration of her family across seas and continents to the Wild West. The poems consider what souvenirs are kept as histories are buried, found and reinvented.
Writing in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Carribean Fragoza says of Souvenir: “Suzara unapologetically reclaims these relics — the stuff of museums, libraries, and archives — and reassembles them to break old historical narratives and sing life into new ones....Her songs gather together clashing voices that reveal colonization to be an exchange that is never unidirectional or uniform...The danger of narratives is that they can be perpetrated and inflicted again and again, for centuries. Poets like Aimee Suzara not only have the courage to handle these weapons of history, but they have the skill to disarm them. They have the ability to take apart the museum itself and reassemble it in unexpected ways.”
Published by WorldTech Editions
WILLA 2015 Award Finalist
“While the 1904 World’s Fair displayed Filipino bodies for an American audience, Aimee Suzara’s poetry flips the script to question the ethics of the imperial gaze. Juxtaposing the exposition with her own migrations, she paints an intimate portrait of her family amid all-American landscapes, foods, music, dreams and disappointments. By engaging with a variety of archival material and a range of poetic modes (lyric, narrative, documentary, collage), Suzara keeps our attention on the voices, objects, and memories that we hold onto to survive. In the end, the poet asks herself, her ancestors, and us: “What do you brace, so as not to break”?”
“We need this book. This naming. This documentation. This honoring. When Suzara writes, “Listen…we / gentle butanding / turned the sea into milk,” a prophetic speaker warns us of the dangers of cultural and environmental loss. Through multiple voices, Suzara tells it like it is.”
“Suzara is a deep chronicler of our hopes, dreams, pains, and future. Borderless yet profoundly situated, she is the motherjoyscream we must wake up to. We need these poems more than ever.”
“In the similar way that an attorney would present the results of legal discovery to a court, Suzara’s speaker too seems to be exacting claims against U.S. imperialism through the staggering amount of research behind her work.”
Finding the Bones
In Finding the Bones, Aimee Suzara writes about a Filipino migrant family, their place in the Philippines and the U.S., as well as the relationship between the “sending” and “receiving” country. The scope is simultaneously expansive (geographically and historically) and intimate as she asks the reader to constantly move between countries, to grasp the present by understanding the past. Divided into three sections, Finding the Bones digs through the materials of an unnamed narrator’s personal and family story, while discovering ancient layers of sedimented life, creatures that bear some eerie semblance to us. Suzara’s poetic excavations complicate the relationship between “hard science” and supernatural activity and re-member their artifacts into new life forms.
REVIEW of FINDING THE BONES in South El Monte Arts Posse - published March 2013
the space between
“the space between is a deeply felt, artful book. In the poems that comprise this collection, Aimee Suzara skillfully evokes memory, family, political lif and the life of the boy. There is an emphasis on word choice that makes the lines surprising and interesting–and yet there is also a closeness to speech that alloes the write to convey real information to the reader about her experiences, as well s an intimate snese of her hopes and fear. The characters are compelling and memorable. the space between is a passionate, well-written book–a great first book–and a wonderful read.”
–Laura Moriarty, author and Deputy Director, Small Press Distribution