Dayo

"Dayo by Marc Perez is a collection of poetry that is ranging and delicate, allusive and taut, insightful and present. Perez has a voice that telescopes expertly from the particular and local to the diasporic and world-encompassing, sometimes in the same breath line, sometimes in the same image.

Great poetry re-creates the world, and Perez's world is here, built from the fleeting moments you don't always notice, built beautifully, built to last." - Wayde Compton, author of The Outer Harbour and The Blue Road: A Fable of Migration

"Dayo is the most gracious of invitations into a newfound home somewhere singular between the plant and animal kingdoms, the natural and urban worlds, pragmatic fulfillment and sagacious longing, lockdown and liberation, the sacred and profane, the Philippines and the West. Here, in Perez's universe, displacement, disembodiment, and reptilian republics threaten to continue to take root and reign. Thus, the poet re-imagines a reverential re-embodiment where 'Form is the leaf that sprouts from your toes' in a stunningly observed world of 'ordinary sacredness,/like the unfurling of fiddleheads.' By the end of all the belovedness catalogued in this book, you too will be heavier with the weight of all that is most gorgeous about this world." - Ed Bok Lee, author of Mitochondrial Night and Whorled

"One of the things that most impresses me about this lush, lyrical and soulful collection is its ability to hold hope alongside melancholy and despair. Even as Perez grapples with the brutality of global borders and immigration policies, among other atrocities, he also writes toward a flowering, where seeds of pain become a 'leafy garden/where cicadas could return.' Perez writes for day laborers and minimum wage workers, for students in debt and crocodiles in captivity. With incredible empathy and insight, he writes for 'the fragments of ourselves, pieced together by grief.'" - Jen Currin, author of Trinity Street

"Dayo is a lush cartography of a world in verse. The crawling streams and stubborn gardens in Marc Perez's poems unfold with the exquisite patience of Henry David Thoreau and Dionne Brand all at once, then pull into focus through the lives that give these scenes their perpetual motion. At once cinematic and elegiac, this book is an unforgettable contribution and a remarkable achievement." - Adrian De Leon, author of barangay: an offshore poem

"Can poems start a fire, create refuge, resurrect selves, and help return one home?...These questions, under the umbrella of belonging and what that means in a world engulfed by inequality, violence, and environmental destruction, consume these verdant verses, with the act of recording, perhaps, a means of unburdening, laying bare the disparities - to channel change, the societal and the personal." - Wanda Praamsma, The Toronto Star

"Dayo is a collection that documents each moment as it passes. It is lush and animate in describing the mundane, gentle in its nostalgia and reflections of home, and sharp in its commentary on enclosures and borders. Each word is a seed of complex sensory images that sprout through the page to find connections across the book. These poems are elegant in the way they consider how fleeting each moment really is, while being deeply rooted in the possibilities of a good life. It is a nourishing and sturdy achievement." - from the jurors of the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award