Glossolalia
Glossolalia
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About the Book
Feverish from the engrossing revelatory arcs of the uncanny, Glossolalia is a mind-bending foray into the twisted underlying logic of material reality and a rip-roaring romp through Philippine urban legends, psychogeography, and the uncomfortable, often seedy aspects of music, cinema, and art. Marlon Hacla—who is a computer programmer as well as a poet and created the first robot poet in Filipino, Estela Vadal—is a significant innovator in the Philippine poetic tradition. As Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III notes in his introduction, Hacla “eschews the spare language, subtle imagery, and quietism featured in most contemporary Philippine poetry. Hacla’s poems, especially here in Glossolalia (and in its informal sequel Melismas), read like an unapologetic statement against the New Critical tradition that has been pushing its weight in the Philippine literary scene for more than half a century.” This collection of relentless, densely layered prose poems is the third of Hacla’s books to be translated into English by Kristine Ong Muslim.
Author
Marlon Hacla
Marlon Hacla is a poet and artist living in Quezon City, Philippines. His first poetry collection, May Mga Dumadaang Anghel sa Parang (Manila: National Commission for Culture and the Arts, 2010), was published as part of UBOD New Authors Series II. His second book, Glossolalia, was published by High Chair in 2013. Kristine Ong Muslim’s English translations of his books are Melismas (Oomph Press, 2020), There Are Angels Walking the Fields (Broken Sleep Books, 2021), and Glossolalia (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023).
Translator
Kristine Ong Muslim
Kristine Ong Muslim is the author of The Drone Outside (Eibonvale Press, 2017), Black Arcadia (University of the Philippines Press, 2017), Meditations of a Beast (Cornerstone Press, 2016), Butterfly Dream (Snuggly Books, 2016), Age of Blight (Unnamed Press, 2016), and several other books of fiction and poetry. She has co-edited numerous anthologies of fiction, including Destination: SEA 2050 A.D. (Penguin Random House SEA, 2022), Ulirát: Best Contemporary Stories in Translation from the Philippines (Gaudy Boy, 2021), and the British Fantasy Award-winning People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction! (2016). Her translation of Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III’s novel, Book of the Damned, won a 2023 PEN/Heim grant. She is also the translator of nine books by Filipino authors Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles, Rogelio Braga, and Marlon Hacla. Widely anthologized, Muslim’s short stories have been published in Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, and World Literature Today and translated into Bulgarian, Czech, German, Japanese, Polish, and Serbian. She lives in a small farmhouse in Sitio Magutay, a remote rural highland town in southern Philippines.
Contributor
Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III
Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III teaches courses on Southeast Asian literature and creative writing at the Department of Filipino and Philippine Literature, University of the Philippines Diliman. He is the author of the novel Aklat ng mga Naiwan (Book of the Damned), coeditor of Ulirát: Best Contemporary Stories in Translation from the Philippines, and co-editor and co-translator of Wiji Thukul’s Balada ng Bala (The Ballad of a Bullet). His research and other creative works have been published in Likhaan, JONUS, Southeast Asian Studies, Talas, and Tomas.
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Excerpt
Bluebush
Rooms that kill time until burglars decide to leave them. What is the homework all about? Making a neat stack of off-key tunes? Order? A dead tree? Or a chorus of epiphanies for unscrambling an executioner’s motivations and desires. Funeral birds that you gave as gifts. A parade of tied-up legs headed towards a beckoning forest. A paradise hastily put together.
Half a kernel of corn. Extravagance of roots. Broken bell forcibly deformed until it is mangled beyond recognition.
This is a performance of an upcoming part. Electric fan blades unraveled. I will be right behind you as you walk out the door, be the first to whisper. This is the part of the body that thirsts for sensation. Orange table piled high with bones. Is the source of my joy real?
If the wedding pushes through, it will turn out to be a slippery hitch. If the snag catches again, needles will flow like water. Angel with many faces and many weapons. Fear that latches onto the hem of a dress splattered with blood and mud. One answer to a question about teaching murder. Desire blanketed by light.
Casket that entombed a ritual. A treacherous act to devotion. The eye closing. Our happiness watered down. Poem chased down from a crash-landed dove. Mouth choking from having swallowed whole yet another body.
Triangular open space whose vertices correspond to the kitchen, staircase, scene of the crime.
Beautiful figure that had been ravaged. Dawn vandalized by contrails of warplanes.