“Book Descriptions: Canon’s the unsaid touchstone here: remixed, crisscrossed, shattered but lived with. Tradition is not written against but through. In this way is this book both elegy and praise. A metronome keeps tick, tick, ticking but to an empty house. The old music is sung again, but in the process gets rewritten. I’m reminded of porcelain and paste, ritual and rebelliousness. After the fold of the father, there is the daughter.
Lawrence L. Ypil
When a reader pries the rind of a poem open and works down to the pith, what will she find? Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta answers, and truthfully so: “Perhaps stones, perhaps sugar.” In Burning Houses, her second collection of beautifully crafted poems, the poet continues the exploration of those themes which she first took up in The Proxy Eros: the lives of the body in love, in relationship with self and/or other. In this new work, however, the poet’s voice has acquired more complex richness, a resonance made possible by her willingness to deeply live the questions that language details. After all, “No one said marriage was [merely]/ Architecture”—for if it were, its blueprints would be nothing more than marks on paper. Good poetry—like satisfying sex, a satisfying marriage, a satisfying relationship, authentic feeling (whatever feeling)—can’t be faked. Here is a poet who is wise beyond her years, whose address of contemporary life and its postmodern predicaments is unsentimental without jettisoning tenderness.
Luisa A. Igloria
There is something special happening in these poems. Impossible to tell the view without from within./As if we’d merged, finally, with poetry. It is beyond conceit. It is the play with the metafictive, the metapoetic. It makes a statement about how poetry is about the insistence of poetry.
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