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Legend Sondayo front cover

Legend Sondayo front cover

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Hot off the presses!

Maiana Minahal’s “Legend Sondayo”

from Civil Defense Poetry (2009)

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Cover to cover this book is magic.  The poetry lifts from the page and shapeshifts into a thousand moving pictures that dance and sing and move seamlessly through time, place and gender.  Maiana Minahal has taken a little-known Filipino folktale, spun it on its queer ear, and made a most beautiful re-telling.

~ Sharon Bridgforth, author of love conjure/blues

(N)ever has a work of lyric retelling been so fiercely tender and sonorous as it swings down to us from the branches of ancient trees… I am only entranced by the glowing words, lit like the end of a cigar a wise woman holds between her lips: “Why else/ would the glowing coal not burn her mouth?”

~ Luisa A. Igloria, author of Juan Luna’s Revolver

Minahal’s poetry weaves spells brave and searing and wonderful… Her exactness in the limning of desire, her celebration of the individual moment, that moment when “hand/warming flesh/beneath her shirt” moves toward ecstasy… urges us all to reach out, understand, and discover.

~ Marianne Villanueva, author of Mayor of the Roses

To purchase copies ($12 plus shipping), email legendsondayo@gmail.com.