Joel Toledo, The Blue Ones Are Machines
Toledo’s ruminative, lyrical verses reveal an interior world as lush as a canopy and as irresistible as sadness. His poetry asserts that even as the exterior world makes real all our abstractions, it is beyond its powers to faithfully reflect what runs inside the human machine. In Toledo’s work, the exterior world is all we have, while the self slips ever out of reach. “The problem with the world is that it lacks the patience of light,” he writes, but it is precisely this problem that makes Toledo’s poetry luminous.
An assistant professor at Miriam College, Joel M. Toledo holds a Master’s degree in English Studies (Poetry) from UP Diliman where he nished two undergraduate degrees in journalism and creative writing. He has four books of poetry: Chiaroscuro (UST, 2008); Long Lost Startle (UP, 2009); Ruins and Reconstructions (Anvil, 2011); and Fault Setting (UP, 2015). He co-edited Caracoa 2006 (poetry journal of the Philippine Literary Arts Council) and Under the Storm: An Anthology of Contemporary Philippine Poetry ( e Antithesis Collective, 2011). Chiaroscuro, Ruins and Reconstructions, and Under the Storm were nalists for the National Book Awards. A recipient of the 2006 NCCA Literary Prize, he has won several other awards for his poetry in English: the Palanca, the Philippines Free Press, the Meritage Press Poetry Prize (San Francisco, USA), and the Bridport Prize (Dorset, United Kingdom). In 2011, he enjoyed a Rockefeller Foundation creative arts residency at the Bellagio Center in Italy and was a Fellow at the International Writing Program, University of Iowa. He has served as literary editor of the Philippines Free Press and as a judge for poetry in various literary contests: the Palanca, the Philippines Free Press, and the Maningning Miclat Awards.
Joel Toledo, The Blue Ones Are Machines
2017. deciBels series 2. ISBN 978-1-922181-82-4
102mm x 154mm. 26pp.