Hyphen magazine - Asian American arts, culture, and politics

I am especially drawn to this poem for various reasons. It is an apt beginning to a collection of poems which handle the difficult subject of Filipino manhood, the problem of male role models, and blooming sexuality. Legaspi's poetic speaker enters manhood wearing a flowered skirt, his newly circumcised penis bathed in guava leaf broth, cared for my his mother.

In "Imagined Love Poem to My Mother from My Father," even in the domestic and bloody act of scaling, slitting, and gutting a milkfish, the mother is an mythic mermaid, a precious trophy, "a silver mine to be mined." Here, "to be mined" is also to become the possession of another. Legaspi is especially adept at layering gendered roles and power dynamics, mythological and religious wonder, and desire that is both beautiful and brutal: "Do unto me, the spy / up in the thick fruit tree, as you have done / unto the milkfish...."

Approaching Imago's midpoint, we come across the poem, "Circumcision," which opens with the sleeping father, and the almost adolescent boy who longs to be just like his father. That is, he longs for his penis to look just like his father's penis, which the boy admires as the father sleeps. This scene is both tender and disturbing. Contrasting "Imago," this poem presents clinical terminology associated with the procedure, anesthesia, "contact of hard metal on skin," and stitches. Contrasting "Imago," it is the proud father who accompanies his sons, "his minions," to the clinic, to which the sisters tease: "They are sending you both to the butcher."

Indeed, there is so much more to Legaspi's Imago than circumcision. As a conscientious reader of a Filipino American male poet's work, I hone in on these two poems precisely because I am interested in discussions of Asian American masculinity and sexuality, and I admire Legaspi's honest and intimate meditations on these themes.

You can hear Joseph O. Legaspi read from Imago, and you can pick up copies of the book, when he visits the Bay Area next month. He will read with Kundiman at the Barbara T. Christian Room, 554 Barrows Hall at UC Berkeley on September 17 at 12 noon, and with PAWA, Inc. at the Bayanihan Center on September 19 at 2 pm.