ARASAHAS

PRAISE

Jaya Jacobo is a high priestess of yearning, her rapt, incantatory words at once all texture and sinew yet also gossamer, ethereal. In Arasahas she summons the agony and rapture of desire in its manifold incarnations, traversing moments from the historically and culturally specific to the ephemeral to ones existing beyond time. Language may be inchoate in distilling truth but Jacobo’s svelte poetry–and Benitez’s translation–revels in the possibility and anticipation of such an epiphany blossoming, as hushed, delicate, fleeting as it may be.
—Isabel Sandoval, actress & filmmaker

Drawing from the wild and natural landscape while refracted through disrupted syntax, interpersonal nostalgia, religiosity, folklore and music, these poems dramatise and reflect—nearly in shards while also steeped in shadow—the divided self and spirit in evolution, braving transition and thus in forlorn conflict with our uncompromising world. Here are linguistic insurrections, cosmic disavowals and inward feats of courage we must recognise as necessary in order to become, transform, soar or even transcend.
—Cyril Wong, poet & fictionist 

Conjuring the personal and the mythological, Jaya’s work calls us into an intimacy with both flesh and spirit, each poem a sacred utterance laced with the animistic past, decolonial futurity and most of all, an unfolding trans experience in a new, contested world. In this luminous translation by Christian Benitez, Jacobo reminds us of the power of the other and of being both creature and creation.
—Bhenji Ra, transdisciplinary artist

Jaya Jacobo’s poetry, in the original Filipino, startles in how it amplifies qualities that make the lyric what it is. Reveling in the material and historical filaments of the language while placing the subject in environments that display her cosmopolitanism, Jacobo, in poem after poem, manages to be both lush and flamboyant, on the one hand, and spare, on the other, skillfully deploying the genre’s acknowledged obsession with le mot juste and its predilection for resonance through distillation. Her image work is highly sensuous, sweltering, even sticky—and yet, her poetry also pursues its analytical flirtation with precise abstractions and unnamable vulnerabilities. Christian Jil Benitez’s translation further contributes to this already intricate coalition of paradoxes, fusing a sinewy handling of syntax attuned to the hermeneutic generosity of the contemporary fragment with the undeniable authority of Jacobo’s voice.
—Mark Anthony Cayanan, poet