ESL or You Weren’t Here

Aldrin Valdez knows memory like a compass knows direction. Their handling of truth lives in the texture of loss and the gesture of pausing. One detail explodes into ecstatic, painful orbs of both longing and resisting amidst homes and languages blending. Valdez asks parts of a whole for space to think. The results are not memories fully constructed for accuracy, but images pushing language to bend into experimental portals. Italics set on words stretch with suspense in the ongoing questions of queerness and diaspora. Each time Valdez’s poems enter the page, the lines embrace movement. They change the layout in carefully choreographed moves, shaking the space of a book of poems. ESL or You Weren’t Here becomes a palette for the visual merge of the past re-articulated through embodiment.

Aldrin Valdez tells it slant in poems that speak “a scream muscle, throat & trill”: “my grandmother was my mother,////sounded so queer growing up/I had to translate the story of shame &/ESL…so… that my American friends could/understand my Tagalog trauma”. Sagad with “faggotry in the fuschsia of {their} brain,” the vroom-eared, valiant bakla speakers—Aldrin, Aladdin, Purple Gender, They-child—of these experimental elegies splinter and stammer, mourn and desire in forms that absorb the ways we 1.5ers Flipically will remember the P.I.  “O—to let my mouth/be a site for feeling!” these poems declare, finally, channeling Orpheus while dreaming of the moon and singing their hearts out to Mariah Carey “phaeton-like, staring at the Manila sun/…as though they could see more than its yellow haze”. It’s finally here, I can celebrate, the Pilipinx immigrant bildungsroman I’ve been waiting to read my whole life.

On a deep personal level, Aldrin Valdez’s debut book of poems delves into my own beautifully tortured, torturously beautiful upbringing in Manila: its wonder, humor, imagery, confusion, and nostalgia. Then, from within, its pages fan out airing the mysteries and dichotomies of a queer immigrant body, purple gendered, paradoxical. I marvel at the collection’s tangled grappling—as with the constant negotiations between Tagalog and English, the definition of motherhood—and the process of omission and possession. Being also a visual artist, Valdez is pliant, imagistic, creating collages and giving expert shapes to poems that twist and turn in their churning relocation. But through it all, at the heart of it is a pursuit of connection, of totality: “In this body,/as it meets your body, there is a rhythm/like knowing and unknowing.”