Our Lady of the Carnival: Poems

by J. Neil C. Garcia

Genres: Poetry

156 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

J. Neil C. Garcia finished his BA Journalism (magna cum laude) in the University of Santo Tomas in 1990. He is currently teaching creative writing and comparative literature at the University of the Philippines , Diliman, where he also serves as an associate for poetry in the Institute of Creative Writing . He is the author of numerous poetry collections and works in literary and cultural criticism, including Our Lady of the Carnival (1996), The Sorrows of Water (2000), Kaluluwa (2001), Philippine Gay Culture: The Last Thirty Years (1996), Slip/pages: Essays in Philippine Gay Criticism (1998), Performing the Self: Occasional Prose (2003), The Garden of Wordlessness (2005), and Misterios and Other Poems ( 2005) His latest critical work , Postcolonialism and Filipino Poetics: Essays and Critiques , is a revised version of his PhD dissertation in English Studies: Creative Writing, which he completed in 2003. He is currently working on a full-length book, a postcolonial survey and analysis of Philippine poetry in English.

Reviews

[IE · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the books I wish I have read years ago. Garcia consoles—Our Lady of the Carnival gives me a piece of tradition I have been desperately looking for, and informs me that there is a lot of room for discourse, response. It simultaneously offers a past and a future, though the latter is perhaps more of my making.

I specifically admire the Legends poems, because I appreciate Garcia's devotion to folklore, to an archaic tradition—a predilection that connects him to Lorca—and because it is extremely difficult to recast a publicly-known story (much more 10) without bastardizing it.