Reverse Requiem - by Ina Cariño (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Whiting Award-winning poet Ina Cariño's sophomore collection, Reverse Requiem, explores mental health and wellness, ancestry and lineage, and the enduring complexities of human connection. In a world marked by the failures of capitalism, Reverse Requiem speaks to the lonely parts within all of us--and to the love that persists within community and ourselves, despite everything.

These soulful and elegiac poems, written in Cariño's signature saturated lines, follow a speaker shaped by both subtle and profound personal tragedies. The collection's emotional resonance is deepened by its formal inventiveness: poems shift in length, tone, and use of white space, mirroring the fractured, nonlinear journey at the book's heart. The title, Reverse Requiem, suggests a retracing of a life: rather than unfolding chronologically, the poems are guided by the speaker's shifting mental and emotional states. Early pieces carry a stark, dirge-like weight that gradually gives way to glimmers of hope--proposing that healing, though never linear, remains within reach.

Cariño wrote Reverse Requiem gradually, over the course of a year spent immersed in other creative disciplines, including music and visual art. A mentor once told them, "Even if you stop writing, you're never truly leaving it behind--you're always a writer if you stay open to the world." That openness permeates this collection. Where Feast, Cariño's debut, turned inward, Reverse Requiem reaches outward. While it remains grounded in introspection, this second book reflects a year of emotional risk and connection--extending itself toward the world and those who inhabit it.

Review Quotes

"The invocation of elders, ancestors and 'spirit companions willing me home' provides a through-line for this reversal of the requiem that does not lay the dead to rest in silence but instead communes with and embodies these voices."
--Veronica Corpuz, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"Ina Cariño's poem 'Keep Sweet' shines and slices with the beautiful sharp edges of gems and of being alive."
--Split Lip Magazine

"Ina Cariño's Reverse Requiem addresses the ghosts of history, which through language and tender attention, Cariño exhumes and brings to aliveness with sumptuous naming. Working against silence and power and deeply imbued with liberatory politics, the poems are an ode to self, lineage, and love. This work is a triumph."
--Cathy Linh Che, author of Becoming Ghost, Split, and An Asian American A to Z: A Children's Guide to Our History

"Reverse Requiem at once claims space(s), body(ies), time(s), name(s), people(s), love(s), and food(s) and is unclaimed by them, making possible for what Linda Gregg writes in her essay 'The Art of Finding, ' 'the art of marrying the sacred to the world, the invisible to the human' What we do not want to claim, but must, so that we can be unclaimed by its hold. Cariño claims forms, the truth of beauty, claims family, revolutionaries, and the moon to relinquish its authority over the poet. These baring and fearless poems are built upon the precision of a concise line, the lyric mind considering all the history(ies) enclosed around us."
--Tyree Daye, author of a little bump in the earth

"Ina Cariño's poems are at once soulful and urgently physical--made of questions and salt, of memory and a fingertip dancing across steam. Home in this book is both a longing and an entirely real place, full of mountains, jasmine, an artificial lake, an anti-imperial rage, true raucous celebration, raw piercing grief, and a 'mother's mothers.' This collection asks, 'how to embody / the song of being alive' when so much conspires to kill the music, end the breath? This poetry answers in the most gorgeously strange ways, one of them being silence, a deep silence 'that says yes, I remember this song.'"
--Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities

About the Author

Originally from Baguio City in the Philippines, Ina Cariño is a 2022 Whiting Award winner for poetry. Their work appears in the American Poetry Review, the Margins, Guernica, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Magazine, the Paris Review Daily, Waxwing, New England Review, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman fellow and is the winner of the 2021 Alice James Award for Feast, published by Alice James Books in March 2023. In 2019, Ina founded a poetry reading series called Indigena Collective, a platform that aims to center marginalized creatives in the NC community and beyond.