Dujie Tahat, Balikbayan, poems, 40 pp: Bsalikbayan, ritual, home, family, grief
“For so many Filipinx, balikbayan boxes are totemic. Though we rarely name it as such, the ritual filling of these boxes is an object lesson in diaspora, empire, and the immigrant homesickness that defies English translation. With the same reverent attention to structure, Dujie Tahat unpacks balikbayan—an identity so crammed with questions and contradictions that it might never find a true home, but can find peace in the searching. I love these poems. They are pasalubong from that distant cousin who somehow knows you as intimately as you know yourself.” —ANGELA GARBES
“How much can be said before a box is packed? And how much before it is unpacked? Reading Dujie Tahat’s Balikbayan is a synesthetic experience. Every line folds and unfolds on its scores, revealing each poem’s crisp and dolorous music. This collection is an innovative wonder—to borrow Tahat’s words, here there are “no blemishes.” Only “bloom.”” —JANINE JOSEPH
“In Dujie Tahat’s latest work, they speak of a longing that cannot merely be erased through the accumulation of things. Tahat questions our insistence in the economy of our grief by constructing delicate, jewel-like memory boxes. And in the moment when we open these gifts, we are offered a chance to return to a home that is within ourselves. Within each balikbayan box, the poems extend a hand, beckoning us to also pack a little of ourselves as we revisit the sources of our longings, whether they be the immediacy of familial crisis, the deep trauma of a lost world, or a moment of recognition in the archives of our imagination.” —OLIVER DE LA PAZ
“Balikbayan is a gorgeous legacy of connectedness to one’s self. To fill and deliver a balikbayan box is to build connective tissue across an ocean and to return home bearing gifts. This is precisely and magnificently what Dujie Tahat does in this collection; fills and delivers their story; building the connection across the complexity of living in multiple identities and finding home in ourselves. What Dujie Tahat is able to do with multiple languages (English, Tagalog, Taglish, Hip Hop) is surreal and only further proves this entanglement that only they are able to deliver so gracefully. One of the most compelling collections of poetry I’ve ever come across.” —EBO BARTON
Like its namesake, Balikbayan holds dear life’s extraordinary essentials. Which is to say, this is a collection of shape-shifting care packages: poems as reminders of what sustains us; poems that bear witness to needful defiance; poems of generosity and grit. As Audre Lorde would “make, demand, translate” everyday beauty to build an “arsenal against despair,” Dujie Tahat transfigures hand-me-downs and home-made remixes, “bright trinkets” and love notes and wildflowers. How fortunate we are to read these gifts—to be carried safely beyond “…The Unfathomable News That Every Thing We’ve Ever Known Will Shortly Be On Fire” toward new dreams, new forms. —R.A. VILLANUEVA
In Balikbayan, Dujie Tahat creates a form that enacts a consecration of both a container and an enactment of love within the Filipinx/a/o diaspora. With invention and verve, Tahat packs and packs each balikbayan box to gift us history and tsimis and music and grief, memory and flowers and anger and forgiveness and legacy. These boxes are of and for kasama and pamilya—not limited by borders or time or space. Instead, Tahat crafts universes inside these seemingly mundane, seemingly small receptacles, which grow bigger on the inside, ever-expanding with “a more tender touching,” one that “could stuff a whole mosque in—a cathedral, too.” —MICHELLE PENALOZA
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