In 2020, Kimberly Alidio published two essays on the Poetry Foundation's blog that reflected on her relationship to Language poetry, a movement whose avant-garde poetics have been dismissed by some as apolitical, academic, willfully opaque, and white. But for Kimberly, the experience of reading Language poetry, with its sonics and insistence on alternate forms of meaning-making, recalled a childhood growing up monolingual in a Filipino immigrant household, surrounded by a language Kimberly could not speak. This is an extremely common experience for children of Filipino immigrants, and as a kindred Filipino poet who had grown up in a similar…

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