Waking Up to the Pattern Left by a Snail Overnight

by Jim Pascual Agustin

"In this late 21st century landscape swirling with the debris of recent and older histories, in a present constantly marked by the virus of time, we are all travelers, migrants, or refugees. In our search for what lets us know that neither the dead nor the living have abandoned us to our fate, we startle awake or alive at the smallest sign: a soft body waving a tentacle from out of rock, a snail circumnavigating the world reduced to a windowpane. In these thoughtful poems, Jim Pascual Agustin allows us to consider what else there might be besides shadow or sorrow, between those moments when we feel that what we carry is either heavy as sand or lighter than ash."

--Luisa A. Igloria, 20th Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (Emerita); author of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts


"Jim Pascual Agustin's Waking Up to the Pattern Left by a Snail Overnight is a stunning poetry collection. With his feet in pop culture and his head on a kind of political-ecological-spiritual plane, Agustin writes to the reader in a language that is equally intimate and on fire."

--Mark Statman, author of Hechizo and Exile Home


"What presence, what exquisite sensitivity. Such perspicacity of mind and heart illuminates Jim Pascual Agustin's crystalline poems. Masterfully observed, shone through with Zen penetration, these songs of innocence and experience divine a universe of complex lives lived, torn asunder, celebrated, and mended. You are enveloped in these entirely believable scenarios filled with people and creatures finding themselves in everyday moments, and extraordinary circumstances. With a few deft strokes, many of the poems here range far and delve inwards. Politics, nationality, identity, family, laws of nature - everything everywhere all at once, yet intimately, pulsatingly at home."

--Yeow Kai Chai, author of One to the Dark Tower Comes

94 pages, Paperback

Published March 29, 2023

About the author

Jim Pascual Agustin was born in the Philippines.
Winner of the 2022 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize winner for his manuscript WAKING UP TO THE PATTERN LEFT BY A SNAIL OVERNIGHT, published in March/April 2023.
His previous book is BLOODRED DRAGONFLIES (Deep South). BLUR OF A DOG is forthcoming from his Philippine publisher, San Anselmo Press, which released his two other collections - HOW TO MAKE A SALAGUBANG HELICOPTER & other poems and CROCODILES IN BELFAST & other poems.
His early years were spent in a communal house where he struggled to remember all the names of his numerous cousins. His family was forced out of their land to make way for the construction of a highway named after the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
He owes his love for literature to the late Irish-American priest, Fr. James O'Brien, SJ. Jim was a Fellow of the University of the Philippines Writers Workshop and the Iligan University Writers Workshop. In October 1994, he moved to Cape Town, South Africa.
He has a number of poetry books published by the University of Santo Tomas Publishing House. In 2011, Baha-bahagdang Karupukan (Filipino collection) and Alien to Any Skin (English collection) were simultaneously released.
Blogs for these two books are: www.karupukan.wordpress.com and www.alientoanyskin.wordpress.com
In 2013, Kalmot ng Pusa sa Tagiliran and Sound Before Water were published. 2015 saw the release A Thousand Eyes. His first collection of short stories in Filipino, Sanga sa Basang Lupa, was released in 2016 and has been selected by renowned Filipino novelist Edgar Calabia Samar among the notable books of recent memory.
WINGS OF SMOKE, his eighth poetry book, was released in 2017 by UK publisher The Onslaught Press.

In his adopted country of South Africa he has won second prize in the 2013 New Coin DALRO Poetry Prize and third prize at the 2014 and 2015 Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Award.
Please contact the author through his blog, www.matangmanok.wordpress.com if you are interested in any of his work.

Reviews

[Liandre Marco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sobrang gripping ng mga tula haha napaka-personal especially since kamamatay lang din ng aking ama, napakalalim at bigat ng bawat linya, pinaka-tumatak sakin ung Fingertips.