About Locus
Life in a multicultural, multiethnic nation like the United States leads to complicated, sometimes fragmented experiences of our background and identity. In Locus, Jason Bayani’s poetry explores the experience of identity that haunts Pilipinx-Americans in the wake of the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act, a critical moment left out of most histories of Asian-American life in the United States. Bayani’s poetry seeks to recuperate this silenced experience, rendering the loss of memory migration entails and representing the fragments of cultural history that surface in a new national context. Drawing inspiration from the mixing and layering of musical fragments in DJ culture, Locus lays down tracks of memory to create a confident declaration of a distinctly Pilipinx-American voice, history, and artistic power. Indeed, his work reveals how these new creations often tie us to the most fundamental parts of ourselves: our families, our cultures, the vague memories passed down through generations.
In Locus, Bayani both renders the challenges of migration and captures an experience of selfhood and history, asserting a central place for migrant identity and experience in American culture.
What Reviewers are Saying
“These poems are both poems and tales of magic and myth, ‘creatures of excess’ as the author calls himself. I find this baroque abundance appropriate for such stories of belonging, native land (of the Philippines) and new land. There are also apparitions (‘Every few weeks the Virgin Mary statue/ Would appear on our living room mantle’), initiations, and themes of postcolonialism. These threads are woven and meander through the rich quilt. They move in zigzag, non-linearly, with preface in the middle, and more prefaces to crop up later in the book as well. We read: ‘To know that everything exists in motion/ Is to be held in perfect still.’ That’s how I felt reading this book, and that ‘21 spirits watched over me,’ as this work carried unique spiritual weight.”
“It seems too easy to describe Locus as a ‘mixtape’ but what better metaphor than a work that draws so much inspiration from Bayani’s childhood remembrances of DJ culture? He plays as a selector, where each poem and preface works like a different track to be planned and sequenced in such a way to take the reader on a journey through Bayani’s memories and influences. He plays as mood mixer, balancing comedy, tragedy, love, despair so that each new page contains a potential surprise shift to keep the reader off balance yet in key. Most of all, Locus plays as a showcase of how creative expression is not just powerful but pleasurable, where one can marvel at how Bayani’s wordplay is filled with cuts, loops, scratches and long, meditative breaks. You reach the end and you find yourself wanting to rewind back to go through it all over again.”
“In reading, one listens as though to an oral history that weaves the story of a country and people, once colonized, and the story of a body, which houses an identity – male, brown, and defiant, recounting and vocalizing a struggle in continuum against the rhythm of early hip hop and of ocean waves hitting starlit tropical shores.”
“Though the Filipino American writer confronts numerous challenges each time he goes to the page (among them, an incalculable range of historical and cultural references, a context of systematic and institutional deletion, the seduction of assimilation by form and language, the temptation of nostalgia), Jason Bayani’s poetry collection, Locus, takes all these obstacles head on by way of several strategies—collage, narrative, and myth-making, but most beautifully and painfully, by examining his own affections, betrayals, desires and fears with all the energy the poet can muster. When they try to tell the story of America in the next century, they will have to recount the violence and the tenderness. Bayani is a poet who longs to gauge both by the honest measure of his one ordinary, complicated, brutal, loving voice. Locus is the place—and the proof.”