Jasmine Nikki C. Paredes, Reclamations

In Reclamations, Jasmine Nikki C. Paredes has her eye on the ordinary (“the carrot that has/ traveled miles, only to be/ peeled naked at midnight”) and the oracular (“a bruise-like dark”; “[t]he eye [that] hovers overhead),” fashioning a lyric possessed with the rhythms the city and the iambs of the sea. These are poems of meticulous subtlety and precision, reclaiming memories long gone not in tones of lamentation or exultation but as registers of human experience apprehended in the truth of its first instance—a clarity as hard as diamond, and as piercing. In their durable, unsentimental beauty, the poems expand with wide-awake presence and, after they are read, ignite with silence—“…the kind/ that follows the discovery/of a thing long feared.”

Jasmine Nikki "Nikay" C. Paredes was born and raised in Cebu City, Philippines. She is the author of the chapbook collection We Will See the Scatter (dancing girl press, 2014), from which several poems won first prize in the 2015 Maningning Miclat Poetry Competition. She received a BFA in creative writing from Ateneo de Manila University and an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. She works at the Academy of American Poets and lives in Queens, New York.

Jasmine Nikki C. Paredes, Reclamations
2017. deciBels series 2. ISBN 978-1-922181-36-7
102mm x 154mm. 28pp.