Hyphen magazine - Asian American arts, culture, and politics

One such author writing outside of mainstream market expectations is the poet and interdisciplinary artist Maiana Minahal, former director of UC Berkeley's Poetry for the People. Her second book, Legend Sondayo, has just been released by Berkeley-based Civil Defense Poetry. I just picked up Minahal's pocket-sized book, which I've been carrying around in my purse, and reading in snatches. This is a good way to read a book of poems, savoring them one at a time, appreciating each poem's form, density, and space. She writes prose poem and free verse as adeptly as haiku and hay(na)ku sequence. Here is an excerpt from "stolen/kali":

1	2	3
my	coils claw	knife blade singe
her	wind boils	fist and stab
she	strangle jagged	edge razor diamond
strike	burn deep	fear livid scream
glitter	heart rot	slaughter bind blue

As you may see, Minahal's poems are concrete and active with a woman kicking ass (kali is a Filipino martial art). Read this excerpt aloud and you can hear its musical staccato. The woman's movement is both dance and combat.  

I enjoy Minahal's poetry because, apart from being precisely crafted and lively, it's subversive. It literally subverts an old Filipino folktale of the woman Sondayo, who battles the wind goddess, because the wind goddess stole her husband. In Minahal's retelling, she creates an urban and contemporary Sondayo: "Times have changed, so now I can tell you what I couldn't back then: I fought that wind goddess for my wife, not my husband. In those days, we didn't have all your genderqueer and polyamory or trans tweeners, flaming and flaunting. (More power to them!)"

Writing outside of mainstream expectations is also writing against their expectations. It's a thriving and necessary bottom-up approach which is familiar to those of us who work with community arts organizations. That said, do pick up your copy of Legend Sondayo and show your support for the independent publishers bringing us these necessary voices.