Books

Purchase a copy at any of these locations:
Beacon Press

Bookshop.org

Barnes & Noble

Amazon

Selected by Mahogany L. Browne for the National Poetry Series

An irreverent poetry collection that wrestles with questions of family, mortality, cultural history, and identity from the Filipinx-American experience

“you showed him your teeth, you dared him to look into your mouth to see the metal bands straightening your jaw into an American smile.”—from Field Guide for Accidents


Born in the United States to Filipino immigrants, poet Albert Abonado is no stranger to the language of periphery. Neither wholly “American” nor Filipino, Field Guide for Accidents’s speakers are defined by what they are not: not white enough to be born in America, not Asian enough to feel at home in the Philippines. Abonado’s poetry illuminates the strange and surreal in domestic routine, suturing wounds of love, grief, and the contradiction of being Filipinx-American, 2 identities bound with a hyphen that resists negation. What results is a growing exposure to a world mired in paradox.

The poems in Field Guide for Accidents experiment with the constraints of the poetic line, shaping forms that exhume what tend to haunt us in the silence. In Field Guide for Accidents, memory becomes augmented with the imaginary; suspicion collides with superstition, while spirituality crosses paths with scientific fact. A mother returns to her son as a boat. A stew is prepared with blood yet masked as chocolate. The living eat with the dead in memories built like houses. Mythic, bloodthirsty creatures in Pinoy folklore prey on an exhausted poet. Research conducted in hindsight provides new avenues to explore regret.

For many third-culture kids of the Asian-American diaspora, there is no such thing as a success story for “fitting in.” What matters more is finding where you belong. Spooning images from hand to mouth, the poems in Field Guide for Accidents struggle with what it means to consume and be consumed by American culture.

Jaw Final Cover.jpg
 

In JAW, America pulls a splinter out of a child’s hand, a man hides beneath a body to avoid Japanese soldiers, and God eats spam, white rice, and a fried egg. Giving us an inside look into microaggressions in America, these poems present American and Filipino cultures side by side as they grapple with immigration, identity, and family. This book invites us into the most vulnerable moments of a life, such as a grandfather decomposing in a coffin across from a little boy’s bedroom. To read this collection is to wade through the complexities of place, identity, and the Filipino immigrant experience.

"In order to speak, to loosen his lyrical jaw in this marvelous debut, Abonado invokes a mandibular menagerie to say what the human family might otherwise leave unsaid. This is a totemic book, animal guides appearing when needed in the most ordinary spaces touched by trauma and the surreal, the DNA of our post-racial legacies rearranged to accommodate what is both funny and uncanny to the bone."
—Timothy Liu

“Jaw marks the impressive debut of a poet who doesn’t duck complexity, but speaks in a life-affirming voice we need to hear.”
—Stan Rubin

Purchase a copy here