Invocation to Daughters
Barbara Jane Reyes
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Invocation to Daughters
Barbara Jane Reyes
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
[Reyes] writes from an expansive, complex 'we' that pulls all the quiet daughters out from where they were hidden away. She writes in a new language for the daughters, the mothers, the workers, the immigrants, the monstrous, the bitches, the detained, the dead, the silenced: the women.
Reyes uses incantatory language to speak to Filipina girls and women, and her words will resonate with many, many readers.
The directness of many of the poems that follow feel to me very much in tune with the moment we’re living in, where women in particular, led by women of color, are responding to those people who looked at the election of Donald Trump as evidence that their time had returned, that the fact that the country elected a man who had bragged about sexually assaulting a woman meant it was open season on women everywhere, with middle fingers and public truth-telling and lawsuits.
... powerful.