Melismas

"Poetry, in Marlon Hacla's Melismas, abides by anticipations and arrivals. In these poems, a keen ear bears the vitality of voice, an ecstatic eloquence as song fortifies earth and alludes to grief unravelling. Hacla writes of audacious sentiment and a world wondrous that in these poems translate to an idiom that "returns [us] to the primeval nature of the ordinary." This is a grammar of looking at the world that Kristine Ong Muslim's translation aspires to cultivate, a vocabulary teeming with startling turns: systems that would keep us quiet, method to our extinction, machinery of wind, cellists and their exorcism. In this translation, we go through this cycle in anticipation of "the times [that] have been insinuating scores of uprising," arousals that "grasp the temperament of things." - Carlos Quijon, Jr., Art Historian & Curator "What's most distinguished in Marlon Hacla's Melismas is sincere invocation- "This is how I will carry on: lightning storm that enters a creek, dyed seraphim, bottled scorpion," its indisputable inaugurations of pressure and freedom- "split the violins with an ax," breaching form into form the riddled rhythms of our ageless Age of Noise, proletarian and industrial, domesticated and ferocious, are all "upright pickets" "worshipped by sound." Kristine Ong Muslim, as acousmatic translator, is the essential technomancer of Hacla's objets sonores. She stirs the "aching void" from which she's able to "open the chest that holds the sabers" and transmit a corybantic resistance of language against its own exacting dictatorship. To this Treatise of Self-Subversions Unfolding in Time- "This is no longer me," these "feathers of terror falling on my tabernacles" of perceiving where I perceive farther, stronger the "perspectives of enemies" alongside our relentless critique of reality, I offer solemn gratitude."-Marchiesal Bustamante, author of Mulligan (High Chair, 2016)"So much of Melismas seems to insinuate itself between the recognizable despairs of the commonplace and its disconcerting, rapidly constituting outcomes, Hacla's omnivorous consciousness troubling these two states, investigating and distorting where it is and what it's turning into into the shapes of its own suspicions. The voice of the poem in the Filipino original, so expertly pitched just below histrionics, acquires, in Muslim's translation, a lucidity that foregrounds its role as "the creator of engines that run [its] world": there's a private, arresting deliberateness behind the improvisational disorderings of imagery, the Ashberian way pronouns warp in and out of material antecedents. The distraught voice, relentlessly "eulogiz[ing] the futures," escalates its suspicions into foreknowledge, successfully forestalling but also goading itself toward horror, and exerts a tyranny of imagination over the real that in provocative art, such as in this book, feels a lot like freedom." -Mark Anthony Cayanan, author of Narcissus (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2011), Except you enthrall me (University of the Philippines Press, 2013), and Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous (Giramondo Publishing, forthcoming 2021)"What's most distinguished in Marlon Hacla's Melismas is sincere invocation- "This is how I will carry on: lightning storm that enters a creek, dyed seraphim, bottled scorpion," its indisputable inaugurations of pressure and freedom- "split the violins with an ax," breaching form into form the riddled rhythms of our ageless Age of Noise, proletarian and industrial, domesticated and ferocious, are all "upright pickets" "worshipped by sound." Kristine Ong Muslim, as acousmatic translator, is the essential technomancer of Hacla's objets sonores. She stirs the "aching void" from which she's able to "open the chest that holds the sabers" and transmit a corybantic resistance of language against its own exacting dictatorship..."-Marchiesal Bustamante, author of Mulligan (High Chair, 2016)