Caulbearer

Having just marked its one-year birthday, Luisa A. Igloria’s Caulbearer reads now like a small constellation; each poem a bright, necessary star that keeps its own orbit while throwing light on its neighbours. Open the book and you feel a membrane parting: “porch as reproach, apertures as rapture.” The language is surgical and gentle at once; it lifts the skin of the ordinary to reveal the warm mechanics beneath—hands that have worked and tended, mouths that have named spices and gods, maps that insist there was “something before nothing.”

Igloria writes in liturgies. In her elegies mourning becomes practice: not a quiet folding in, but the communal raising of sound and sauce—“someone flips a side of meat on a charcoal grill,” someone “shakes drops of gin on the ground and claps like a bridegroom.” Those claps—palakpak—are thunder made domestic; they are the earthbound trying on wings. Memory here is not a closet to be locked but a tarp spread over the corner store: tactile, smoky, insistently present. Grief becomes recipe; remembrance is a dance with the dead and the living together.

The book’s appetite is theological and vegetal. In Ambrosia fruit becomes sacrament: “color in tiny cubes pared from cathedral windows,” mangoes like a “garland of breasts full to bursting.” To taste is to claim a lineage; to cut into flesh is to call the goddess forward. Food in these pages is not mere solace but a map back to an originary geography of feeling: a sequence of flavours that teach the tongue to hold its own memory against bland modernity.

That modernity is interrogated—often with wry accusation. The poet’s eye can cut a blueprint to ribbons: Dear Daniel Burnham, you drew streets “whose numbers progressed upward from zero,” but Igloria reminds us there was a citrus grove before the grid. The book repeatedly returns to the ways order erases the unruly—river, grove, spice—only to find those erasures stubbornly persistent. The archive is a cinema, velvet boxes and “brass coins” and “papery vertebrae,” but the reels rewind themselves when the right mouth speaks: Enrique’s hold yields the scent of buah pala and bunga cengkih, memory that will not be footnoted into silence.

Love in Caulbearer is botanical and volatile. The heart that migrates in Portrait of the Heart as Rambutan refuses a frost that would deaden it; it chooses exile into humid flesh—“deep red, sweet kernel inside”—even as its skin remains “a grenade of blisters.” Desire here is a risky geography: to ripen is to risk rupture. Igloria makes tenderness look like insurgency—sweetness with its own small ordinance.

The collection also frames allegiance as rite and question. In the Immigrant Ghazal the pledge becomes an “invocation” and the swearing in a prayer, each immigrant “tufted seed lying in the maw of thunder,” hands lifted like cups that ask to be filled with a fragile torch. Allegiance is not a single answer but an ongoing arriving: you swear, you remake, you feed the flame more brilliance. Even the practical politics of belonging are rendered as incantation—the civic and the spiritual braided into one uneasy braid.

Igloria’s craftsmanship is as much in small gestures as in grand statements. She will tell you, with brisk generosity, to “cut [your remembrance] into pieces for the wind,” to hand it to poets “stenciling their words onto sidewalk squares,” because the act of surrender—of slicing memory for the wind—can also be an act of liberation. The hands that release are hands that have hauled tubers from soil, borne bodies on backs, learned the weight of gunpowder and glass; they are “music and feathers and lightning,” and when they clap the sound is liturgy.

There is a recurring sense of trembling, literal and mnemonic, throughout the book: the house wall trembles not from a train but because “the heart [is] trying to speak of impending eruptions”; the shore trembles with “wind shear before sirens” and the ache of missing “something before it’s even gone.” In those shudders the poems teach a poetics of attention: look for the pre-alarm, listen to the moon jelly’s four “purply-pink flowers quiver,” know that even a pier’s absence keeps making the sea’s margin into a memorial.

What makes Caulbearer so powerful is how it refuses to abide by clean borders—between past and present, body and land, personal and political. Its vocabulary is pyrotechnic and maternal: blossoms and wounds, salt and muscle, maps and archives, moth and caul, spice and ocean. The book’s elegies do not end in vanishing but in practice: hands open, palms up, offering what they carry. One year in, the poems still feel like someone calling a name into a room and hearing it answered; the answer is never absolute, but it is always enough to keep the light moving through the aperture.