摘要：If blurbs are to be trusted, the promise of The Experiment of the Tropics is rather rousing: the back cover flaunts the book’s poetic process, “braiding the music of anthropology with the intimacy of the lyric,” as the poet “explores history’s archives and excavates a city, both real and imagined…” to arrive at “a meditation on the nature of a city and its longing, and the starting capacity of poetry to cut into the violent but redemptive parts of history.” Which is to say: the book is an attempt to interrogate history, particularly that of urban space, most particular in its critical choice of the poem as a mode of inquiry—a feat which is not uncommon for contemporary Filipino poetry in English, but whose forms of realizations are, of course, arguable.
