Irene Suico Soriano

Born in Zamboanga, Philippines in 1969, poet, independent literary & film curator, Irene Suico Soriano immigrated to the US in 1981. She grew up in the neighborhoods of East Hollywood, Rampart/Temple, and the Wilshire Corridor, now known as Koreatown, fed on catholic school angst, 1980s punk, goth, new wave and UK music rags. She obtained a BA in Creative Writing with an emphasis in Poetry and a minor in Playwriting from Loyola Marymount University. Irene is the author of the poetry collection Primates from an Archipelago (Rabbit Fool Press, 2017) and chapbook, Safehouses which Disorient Journalzine published as part of their Emerging Writers Chapbook Series in 1998. A PEN Center USA Emerging Voices fellow, her poems have appeared in Flippin': Filipinos on America (Asian American Writers' Workshop); Babaylan: An Anthology of Filipina and Filipina American Writers (Aunt Lute); Short Fuse: The Global Anthology of New Fusion Poetry (Rattapallax Press), Philippines Free Press, Solidarity Journal, Clamour dyke zine, Maganda's Eleben queer issue and Traffic Report. Irene founded LA's first Asian Pacific American literary reading series "Wrestling Tigers" at the Japanese American National Museum, curating the series from 1994-1998. She was featured in the LA Times in 2000 for her role in co-curating the NEA-funded World Beyond Poetry Festival that featured over 100+ poets from the diverse communities of Los Angeles. Irene has curated literary readings for the Festival of Philippines Arts & Culture (FPAC), the Getty Center, LitFest Pasadena, Highways Performance Space, Pacific Asian Museum and Puro Arte. Irene served as the Fall 2021 Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies (IDAAS) Artist/Activist-in-Residence at the Claremont Colleges and co-taught Art & Revolution: Filipinx Diaspora Aesthetics and Poetics with Pitzer professor, Todd Honma.

“The poems in Primates from an Archipelago are irresistible. These pages are filled with images so lush and skillful, they carry the imagination dangerously to the brink of falling into pleasure, but watch out for the painful message that the truth kicks us with from these stories.”

Janice Mirikitani, San Francisco’s Poet Laureate, 2000

“Irene Suico Soriano marks the distance between the classroom of uniformed children to the women, some of them widows who stare through storefront windows. Fathers and Brothers all in search of a language once spoken in secret. This is the language she paints across the heart of the city: Lincoln Heights periphery detours head on into downtown traffic in central Luzon. Glossy calendar pages are torn from the wall of Memory. Stars once suspended in night sky, she pours inside pale blue envelopes marked ‘personal,’ poems like anniversary petals pressed between the self, poems transparent as skin.”

Marisela Norte, author of Peeping Peeping Tom Tom Girl

In this cinematic collection of poetry, Irene Suico Soriano unravels threads of silence and oppression. Primates from an Archipelago traces lineages on geographic and personal islands where memories and dreams are synonymous. Balanced with official documentation such as passports, birth and death certificates, and membership cards, the poems also speak the languages of uncertainties and multiple truths. The collection travels from homeland exile and loss in the Philippines, to the author’s origin story in Zamboanga, on to sites where experience and education have shaped her world view, and finally to Los Angeles, the city of settlement and fractured pasts. Mythical and intimate, Primates from an Archipelago illustrates the sad beauty that lies in the gaps.

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The Small-Town Dictator
for Kian Loyd delos Santos
What about that small-town dictator from the hinterlands
who tried to find ways to rope his prisoners just the right way,
delighted in seeing them suspended high in midair
just taut enough to make them squeal like
the slaughtered pigs he heard outside his window
every Thursday night?
And then your reply:
-he was a murderer, a psychopath, a special case
I add:
-he wasn’t actually the one who roped the
prisoners or pulled them up to hang
-what of the men he paid to do it?
All done to get that regular flow of pesos
to purchase the pencils, cell phones, and uniforms
needed by their families.
These men learned to numb their insides,
put wax inside their ears to drown out the sounds,
and eucalyptus oil under their nose to counter the smell
of urine, blood, and feces that ended up on their slippers. They
were the small murderers.
The big murderer wore white and never got soiled.
A dictator’s secretary hums this song nightly to his little children:
We are just one cruel act away towards each other.
If we can easily do it to an animal,
we are but one animal away from doing it to each other.

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