Hi everyone. Thanks for the feedback with the last poems. It always helps to have extra eyes look over your work and give you good advice (and to catch any un-intended grammatical mistakes).

This week’s poems are both responses to works I’ve encountered recently either directly or indirectly through Prof. Dungy’s classes. The first one is in response to Sarah Messer’s Bandit Letters. I highly recommend reading this book if you are in any way interested in contemporary historical poetry set in the West. Her work is simply sublime!

My response poem tried to combine the south, steam punk and pirates (because pirates rock). Hope the poem does some just to Messer’s work.

You’ll be Rewarded Within a Month

The second poem is in response to Barbara Jane Reyes’s poem,“Where Did Your Mother Live?”

Prof. Dungy introduced me to Reyes’s work last year, recommending that I read her books because of my interest in Filipino-American poetry. Unfortunately, I haven’t yet read any of her books but I did get a chance, recently, to visit her site. She is a CAL alumni who graduated from SFSU with a MFA in creative writing and has published nervous books of poetry related to identity, the Filipino-American experience, and living in the SF Bay Area. In short, she is what I aspire to be! Her poetry also hits home for me, as a mixed American with Filipino roots. I borrowed heavily from here in this next piece, especially where form is concerned. However, I tired to vary the theme through the type of repetition (instead of “in” I use “the,” because my emphasis is on identity as apposed to place) and images I used. Hopefully I was able to capture the same kind of emotion. I’ll let you be the judge:

What are you

Hope you enjoy the poems. As always feel free to comment and critique.

Thanks a bunch.

-Rose