Field Guide for Accidents - (National Poetry) by Albert Abonado (Paperback)

About the Book

"Field Guide for Accidents begins with a prayer and carries us through nature among the wings of birdsong and a mother's healing psalms. Each poem betwixt breath and faith. Faith in God and faith in the loss of one's identity. The line breaks and the lemons illuminated. The insistence of a family silence and the temptation to follow the sound of one's internal weeping, all a joyous unearthing"--

Book Synopsis

SELECTED BY MAHOGANY L. BROWNE FOR THE NATIONAL POETRY SERIES

An irreverent poetry collection that wrestles with questions of family, mortality, cultural history, and identity from the Filipinx-American experience

"you showed him your teeth, you dared him to look into your mouth to see the metal bands straightening your jaw into an American smile."--from Field Guide for Accidents

Born in the United States to Filipino immigrants, poet Albert Abonado is no stranger to the language of periphery. Neither wholly "American" nor Filipino, Field Guide for Accidents's speakers are defined by what they are not: not white enough to be born in America, not Asian enough to feel at home in the Philippines. Abonado's poetry illuminates the strange and surreal in domestic routine, suturing wounds of love, grief, and the contradiction of being Filipinx-American, two identities bound with a hyphen that resists negation. What results is a growing exposure to a world mired in paradox.

The poems in Field Guide for Accidents experiment with the constraints of the poetic line, shaping forms that exhume what tend to haunt us in the silence. In Field Guide for Accidents, memory becomes augmented with the imaginary; suspicion collides with superstition, while spirituality crosses paths with scientific fact. A mother returns to her son as a boat. A stew is prepared with blood yet masked as chocolate. The living eat with the dead in memories built like houses. Mythic, bloodthirsty creatures in Pinoy folklore prey on an exhausted poet. Research conducted in hindsight provides new avenues to explore regret.

For many third-culture kids of the Asian-American diaspora, there is no such thing as a success story for "fitting in." What matters more is finding where you belong. Spooning images from hand to mouth, the poems in Field Guide for Accidents struggle with what it means to consume and be consumed by American culture.

Review Quotes

"Albert Abonado's poems open us up to feast and to wonder. This book asks: How do we grieve with the belly? How can we find nourishment from a cloud? Why don't we laugh, really laugh out loud, more often--and isn't that a form of prayer? And when can our exhausted parents rest, when can the immigrant worker fully rest, mouth open in dream, snores at full delicious blast? I feel so held by this book. Cradled, in fact. While, at the same time, challenged--to climb a tree, to dive into sea, to stop hiding my own hunger, my teeth. 'Every good mouth knows when to be unhinged, ' one poem declares, and I want to live inside that declaration. Let this poetry unhinge your life."
--Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

"Full of ghosts and prayers, Field Guide for Accidents is an exceptional book. Albert Abonado is a poet with the ability to maintain a clear and precise voice while navigating mysteries that are as vast as god and family and grief and America. The result is a collection of poems that are as insightful as they are emotionally expansive."
--Matthew Olzmann, author of Constellation Route

About the Author

Albert Abonado is the author of Jaw (Sundress Publications). He holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. His writing has appeared in the Boston Review, Colorado Review, Poetry Northwest, The Margins, Hobart, Waxwing, Triquarterly, and others. Albert currently teaches creative writing at SUNY Geneseo and the Rochester Institute for Technology. He is the former Director of Adult Programs at Writers & Books.