Delivered: Poems

"'I play on my america xylophone/ and the kids drop peach hat by aching peach hat,' says Gambito midway through one of the giddy, fragment-filled, enthusiastic, sometimes flirtatious odes and self-portraits of this second collection, attendant simultaneously to Gambito's Filipino-American heritage and the outlook of 21st-century youth. 'I am the new bathing suit that I am,' she declares in 'Immigration,' one of a few poems by that name: this one takes an epigraph from the Egyptian Book of the Dead and an interlinear exclamation from the Filipino language Tagalog. Gambito (Matadora) evokes a carnival of multiethnic references, intuitive leaps and fiery existential queries: 'I like God alright but I don't understand anything he's talking about.' She might be likened to such other cosmopolitan poets as Matthea Harvey or Mark Bibbins: Gambito also excels in one-line stanzas, in long knockout titles ('A Borderless Ethos Would Please Everyone') and in dreamy one-paragraph prose poems. Yet if such forms make her seem solitary or disconnected, her topics make her memories, and her loyalties, multiply clear: 'You were born here. I was born there.'" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Sarah Gambito is the author of a previous collection, Matadora. Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, The New Republic, Fence and other journals. She is co-founder and Executive Director of Kundiman, an organization that promotes Asian American poetry. She lives in New York City.