Be by Patria Rivera

Be by Patria Rivera

The flesh of blood and memory populates the world of BE, a collection of poems that stubbornly seek human identity in an increasingly inhumane world. In micropoetic narratives, the collective I says, "I am here," and proceeds to explore the insular and peculiar ways language, emotion, and truth-telling scour the painful moments of vision that lurk beneath calm and unknown depths.

There are things one cannot ever hope to understand. Does existence precede essence even if essence was available? In a collage of disparate images, the BE poems spin together individual and collective states of feelings to examine the fragments of the human condition in little existences. Picture the man and woman wandering forlornly through an abandoned universe or what happens to some of the people in the villages, in the feudal backwaters where inhabitants become stupefied, brutalized and spiritually impoverished, yet to the outside world appear to suffer a quiet, gentle contentment and peace. Or how we all live by pushing rocks up slopes, or as in some of the poet's characters, by bottling the ashes of a once-dormant-now-live volcano for hawking to tourists as souvenirs.

Brooding. Teasing. Questioning. Doubting. Discovering. The quest could be tragic or comic, but the endeavour could stretch the most ordinary things into new shapes and meanings. As an assemblage, BE proves that it is possible to recover a semblance of reality, if not truth itself, through inferences that quite closely resemble it.

The Time Between is poet Patria Rivera's fourth poetry collection. Her first poetry collection, Puti/White, was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. She has also co-authored two chapbooks, Weathering: An Exchange of Poems and Sixth from the Sixth. Rivera's poetry is featured in Oxford University Press's Perspectives in Ideology, and in Elana Wolff's Implicate me: Short essays on reading contemporary poems. Her poems have also been published in the Literary Review of Canada, Fireweed, and other Canadian and international publications. In 1997 Rivera won an honourable mention in the ARC Poetry Magazine Second Annual Poem of the Year Contest for her poem, Living on the borders, dying in the margins. In 2005 her poem Rare species was selected as the second-prize winner in the QWERTY'sEric Hill Award of Poetic Excellence competition. Rivera has received fellowships from the Writers' Union of Canada, the Banff Centre for the Arts, and the Hawthornden Castle International Writers' Retreat Centre in Scotland. She was also a recipient of the Global Filipino Literary Award for Poetry. Born and raised in the Philippines, Rivera graduated with a journalism degree from the University of the Philippines. She has also undertaken media and editing studies at the International Training Institute in Sydney, Australia, the International Institute for Journalism in Berlin, Germany, and the Nieman Centre for Journalism at Harvard University.