Embers of Emotion | Burning Houses & Hush Harbor by Mookie Katigbak Lacuesta
“To arrive at the pulp means / a willful tear at the rind. / and once there? // perhaps stones, perhaps sugar.”
It was in 2019 when I started looking into Filipino authors. Because of my undergrad, I was quite familiar with the “Golden Age of Philippine Literature” writers— roughly from the 1920s-1940s — but I had a vast knowledge gap when it came to postwar, post-EDSA, to contemporary works and writers.
I was assisted mainly by the World Wide Web in bridging this gap. I’d scour the Internet for whatever works were available, most of which were poetry. Through these “samplers,” I’d decide whether or not I like the author’s work enough to buy a collection. It’s through this practice that I slowly became familiar with the names and works of contemporary Filipino authors.
This was how I first came across the works of Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta. It was a poem titled “Crust of Bread and Such —” that first caught my attention. Later I discovered the poem was published in a collection called “Hush Harbor.”
That is why when I saw two of her poetry collections combined into one book at the Philippine Book Festival, I had to pick it up.
Needless to say, I was more interested in her collection “Hush Harbor,” which revolves around different themes like a lover’s longing, desire, and colonization. And while true that it has some stunning lines, overall, I liked it less. I find the voice in this collection distant, making it harder for me to connect. The poems I found were too manicured, the metaphors masking instead of revealing the true emotions behind each piece.
I connected more with Burning Houses, which she called her “weird child” in the signed and dedicated copy I own. Domestic poetry is the focus of BH, whose entries one can sense were deeply personal. I saw glimpses of her childhood, adolescence, and home life in this collection. One can almost see Mookie peeling away layers of memories and revealing to the reader whatever she finds — perhaps stone, perhaps sugar.
In both collections, I loved it best when Mookie conversed with different authors and works. It may just be me and my love of intertextuality. Still, her ideas as she conversed with other voices were fascinating, sometimes even visceral.
Looking at Goodread’s average rating of the two collections, I am not alone in my partiality towards Burning Houses. I hope she’ll embrace this “weirdness” in her subsequent collections. Because it’s what makes me connect to her works more. It takes a lot to be vulnerable, but poems should reveal us, not conceal us.
An earlier version of this feature appeared on my Instagram page.
