In Feast, Ina Cariño's debut poetry collection, imagery of food and the body builds an evocative picture of childhood in the Philippines and, later, life in the United States. Autobiographical verse records a Filipinx coming of age, with memories of head lice, learning about puberty from a book, and, in the title poem, watching the slaughter of a suckling pig. In the teasingly erotic "Milk," the speaker encounters racist assumptions from a white boyfriend and his parents. "Triptych with Cityscape" introduces another recurring topic: treatment for mental illness in a Chicago hospital. Metaphors draw on food and colors. Sepia is the hue of memory; salt preserves trauma, but honey sweetens the outlook. Cariño's vocabulary is visual and tangible, as in "my lungs/ turned to wrinkled quinces." The poet's gaze often turns to the body: "Shingles" recalls caring for an ill grandmother, and "Birthstone" reveals that their mother kept in her jewelry box a piece of the umbilical cord that once connected them.
"Tongue" is a key word throughout the collection, referring by turns to a prized foodstuff, a body part, or a language: "surrendering to a new tongue/ is having mine sliced/ on the jag of expectation:/ language cut on sweetened rim." Snippets of Tagalog enhance the pleasing rhythms created by alliteration. For instance, a poem about the aftermath of a 1990 earthquake in Luzon includes the line "follow trails of flies to find the faceless under rubble." A true banquet for the senses, Feast is perfect for readers of Cynthia Miller and Nina Mingya Powles. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader, and blogger at Bookish Beck