Birth Language - by Aimee Suzara (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Aimee Suzara's second full-length book Birth Language centers on a Filipina-American time traveling through her history, twisted and haunted like the roots of a balete tree.

The book fuses English, Spanish, and Tagalog. It employs archival texts from as early as the 1500s when European conquistadors and explorers encountered the pre-colonial Philippine islands. Guided by the babaylan (shaman) and populated by mythical creatures like the mananneansal kapre, and sireno, the collection celebrates a history of resistance, reclaiming and redefining the self despite colonization, assimilation, and cultural loss.

Review Quotes

"What a gorgeous collection of poetry Aimee Suzara's birth language is--creation story that is intertextual, linguistically rigorous and precise, historical, deeply, deeply personal and vulnerable. She grounds herself in old belief and birth, both bloody and beautiful. Her poetic voice is unwavering, a diasporic daughter talking back to colonial power sharp and unflinching, talking to the precious and willful child she births, "furious butterfly, / thrum of a colibrí," talking to her mythopoetic motherbody, and talking to and of the spirits. She is a foreign-born balikbayan, and she is sirena and aswang--what a satisfying poetics of hunger and possibility."
--Barbara Jane Reyes, author of Invocation to Daughters and Letters to a Young Brown Girl

"Birth Language is visionary and transcendent, the voice of a master lyricist and storyteller. The Filipina American speaker confronts colonial history and the "inner-colonized and inner-colonizer," while experiencing rituals, mythic spirits, and motherhood. Suzara writes, "Your inheritance is dilution. It is up to you to go back to the sources." These poems are deep excavation work. The effect is liberatory."
--Lee Herrick, California Poet Laureate and author of In Praise of Late Wonder and Scar and Flower

"Aimee Suzara's highly anticipated new collection dives into the themes of culture, history, and motherhood. Through poetic song, chant, and rituals, these poems suture the fragments of family memory, the history and folklore of the Philippines, and the experiences of migration and diaspora. Suzara has the rare gift of being able to craft work that is multilingual, hybrid, environmental, and deeply political. Throughout, she praises the acts of birth and languaging, home and healing."
--Craig Santos Perez, author of National Book Award-winning From Unincorporated Territory

"Birth Language glories in introducing multiple languages into English so we listen closely and expand our hearing. Suzara's ecstatic book builds in movements of increasing scope so we hear orchestra and opera all along. The hunger, breath, taste, and trill of these inquisitive poems of the tongue simply engulf the reader. A passionate read, a pleasure!"
--Heid Erdrich, author of Verb Animate and National Poetry Series winner Little Big Bully

About the Author

Filipino American poet, playwright, performer, and educator, Aimee Suzara, is the author of the poetry collection SOUVENIR (Wordtech Editions, 2014) and two chapbooks, Finding the Bones and The Space Between (Finishing Line Press, 2013 and 2008). Her poems, prose, and plays have appeared in Kartika Review, California Language Association Journal, Orion Magazine, Raising Mothers, Poets.org, Mom Egg Review, and Women Re-Creating Classics(Bloomsbury 2025), among others. As a multidisciplinary performer, Suzara has collaborated with dance theater and music ensembles such as Deep Waters Dance Theater and the Grammy Award-winning Kronos Quartet. She holds degrees from UC Berkeley and Mills College. Based in Oakland, California, she teaches writing at Bay Area colleges and universities and through her coaching business, Wild Tongues.