Lawrence Bernabe, Transitoria

In Transitoria, Lawrence Bernabe—through his quick, bracing, and energetic lines—captures reality perceived and/or imagined, from a point of stillness to the vector of speed. He argues time only comes alive through the human element and attention, how it is essentially doubled by the “one who moves through it,” which transforms time from an impersonal force to a field of notations. For his poems are thunderbolt markers of experience, resisting closure, summary, the tyranny of introspection. This is the poetry of today: startled, quick-footed, registering the world at the moment of perception before it vanishes: the “view from the window” that “(s)hort circuits the mind.”

Lawrence Bernabe lives in Quezon City and has published his poems in several independent presses and university journals, including High Chair Philippines and The Kritika Kultura Anthology of New Philippine Writing in English. This is his first collection.