Arvin Abejo Mangohig, Lost Things

Lost Things by Arvin Abejo Mangohig is a book about disappearances: “tropical islands,” “the stories still to be told,” “your real name.” The task of the poet is as a recording angel, recalling from the brink of extinction everything that has been lost, urged by the voice telling him that“(a)ll this…must be written down.” Part of this act of recovery is to inhabit the skin of another, to the extent that the empathy of the imagination can allow, so that “(t)ogether we will walk out of the real into our true lives.” It is a life that necessarily has its eye on the end, but is endowed with a keen sense of the middle, the lived part, the “luminous thing.”    

Arvin Abejo Mangohig is the author of The Gaze: Poems (University of the Philippines Press, 2003) and Bloodflow: A Lyric Sequence (De La Salle University Publishing House/Central Books, 2012). He was a Fellow for Poetry for the UP National Writers Workshop 2017 and recently won second prize in the Kokoy Guevara Poetry Competition. Mangohig has BA and MA degrees from UP Diliman. He works as copy editor at the UP Press.

Arvin Abejo Mangohig, Lost Things
2017. deciBels series 2. ISBN 978-1-922181-75-6
102mm x 154mm. 22pp.