And Yet Held by T. De Los Reyes

Description

T. De Los Reyes’s collection And Yet Held is for people who live on the margins, who are creating their own path in the world where merely existing becomes an impossibility, and where living a life on one’s own terms is an act of courage. Knowing it takes a certain amount of gumption and surrender to lean towards vulnerability, this book is meant to be held by someone who is looking for poems about love and discovers it is also poems about the self—and in that discovering recognizes, “Finally, I am found.”

“I’m in love with this collection of poems that’s so full of the complex beauty of the day to day. In the midst of so many of these poems I find myself grinning with pleasure at the same time that my heart is pierced with longing, grief, the inexplicable weight of mourning. I’m such a fan of T. De Los Reyes.”  —Gabrielle Calvocoressi

“At the end of ‘Debris,’ T. De Los Reyes offers up, ‘Oh, how I am but skin fragmented by touch, from / which a little flower blooms amidst all the wreckage. / And, having been found, waits to be kissed.’ Tenderness and touch are the ordinary magic that moves the world in these poems. A chapbook that is expansive in its impressive ability to capture the simple moments that make wonder of our living, each poem here is a domestic gesture towards the divine, towards the nature world, towards touch as a language all its own. In And Yet Held, De Los Reyes is invigorating language around the intricacies of the human condition. Within the brevity of this book, readers are guided by the hand into the intimate lives documented here. After each poem, I am left with ‘salt on my lips and a hymn.’”  —I. S. Jones

“‘My heart has cracked open like a window, holy, holy, holy’ writes T. De Los Reyes in her lush chapbook And Yet Held, which excavates all the gestures—minute and magnificent—of the heart. With intimate poems that are yearning and enduring, De Los Reyes demonstrates how vulnerability is its own power, and the economy of the collection belies the immeasurable landscape and exquisite detail, which embraces love—and language—in all its imperfect glory. Her work centers on passion and wonder—the brush of an eyelash, the tender violence of a kiss, desire for all we have and all that’s yet to be—and urges us to seek and savor quotidian joys. In ‘Witness,’ the speaker pleads: ‘Whatever / the rest of the night brings, / the rest of my life, too, in this / wretched world, let me have / this for a little while.’ And Yet Held provides such a respite from our own wretched world, with delight.” —Mandana Chaffa

T. De Los Reyes

T. De Los Reyes is a Filipino poet and designer. She is the author of the chapbook Woeman, published by Hawai’i Review. A finalist for the 2021 Sappho Prize by Palette Poetry, her poems have appeared in Birdcoat Quarterly, Crazyhorse, Hobart After Dark, Pleiades, and Split Lip Magazine, among others. Her work revolves around womanhood, eros, and mapping the body—exploring geography vis-à-vis the question of identity as a person of color.

Past recognitions include Notable Manuscript for the 2016 Chapbook Prize by BOAAT Press and First Place in Filipino Poetry in the 2007 Maningning Miclat Poetry Awards. She was named a Fellow for Filipino Poetry in the 2006 Ateneo Institute of Literary Arts and Practices National Writers Workshop.

De Los Reyes is the founder and curator of Read a Little Poetry. She is the designer of Nowruz Journal and a mentor/community teaching assistant for Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (ModPo), a highly successful, massive open online course offered by the University of Pennsylvania, for the past decade.

She lives and writes in Manila, Philippines.