Souvenir

In SOUVENIR, a compelling debut book by Aimee Suzara, a Filipino-American woman encounters narratives of her history-from the "living exhibits" of Filipinos in the 1904 World's Fair to the migration of her family across seas and continents to the Wild West. The poems consider what souvenirs are kept as histories are buried, found, and reinvented. Author David Mura calls SOUVENIR a "powerful meditation on history and the legacies of race, family, and identity," in which "Suzara's poetry is precise, cogent, and formally inventive. SOUVENIR adds a necessary and needed portrait in our American mosaic." Writing in THE LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS, Carribean Fragoza says of SOUVENIR: "Her songs gather together clashing voices that reveal colonization to be an exchange that is never unidirectional or uniform...The danger of narratives is that they can be perpetrated and inflicted again and again, for centuries. Their true damage is immeasurable, echoing over time. Poets like Aimee Suzara not only have the courage to handle these weapons of history, but they have the skill to disarm them. They have the ability to take apart the museum itself and reassemble it in unexpected ways."