Tula by Chris Santiago, Paperback | Indigo Chapters

Tula : a ruined Toltec capital; a Russian city known for its accordions; Tagalog for 'poem.'Prismatic, startling, rich with meaning yet sparely composed, Chris Santiago's debut collection of poems begins with one word and transforms it, in a dazzling sleight of hand, into a multivalent symbol for the immigrant experience. Tula : Santiago reveals to readers a distant land devastated by war. Tula : its music beckons in rhythms, time signatures, and lullabies. Tula : can the poem, he seems to ask, build an imaginative bridge back to a family lost to geography, history, and a forgotten language?Inspired by the experiences of the 'blood stranger'-the second-generation immigrant who does not fully acquire the language of his parents- Tula paints the portrait of a mythic homeland that is part ghostly underworld, part unknowable paradise. Language splinters. Impossible islands form an archipelago across its landscape. A mother sings lullabies and a father works the graveyard shift in St. Paul-while in the Philippines, two dissident uncles and a grandfather send messages and telegrams from the afterlife. Deeply ambitious, a collection that examines the shortcomings and possibilities of both language and poetry themselves, Tula announces the arrival of a major new literary talent. | Tula by Chris Santiago, Paperback | Indigo Chapters