Marilyn

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Memoir. Asian American Studies. Winner of the 2017 Association for Asian American Studies Award for Best Book of Creative Writing (Poetry). Amanda [Ngoho] Reavey's first book, MARILYN, began as an exploration through somatic experiments on what it means to stay and became a fragmented map of the immigration system, the international adoption process, and family. How do you articulate disenfranchised grief? How does a person who has no origin write herself into existence? What happens when all you have left is, as Sarita Echavez See says, 'the body to articulate loss'? Framed by a return trip to the Philippines in 2011, her first time back since leaving, Reavey takes the most intense images [real, imagined, dreamed] encountered while living in-between six different countries, and expunges them in attempt to stitch the Asian, diasporic body. The result is an ancestral line, a path back not to the beginning of life nor just before, but rather to the primordial. To ancestral roots. To orality: a name.

Amanda [Ngoho] Reavey has written a work of loss, healing and place. What is a page, both before and after a radical fire? What does it mean to come to language again as to life? Reavey answers these questions through her many attempts in this book, and beyond it, to breathe, create, survive, think and be.--Bhanu Kapil

MARILYN combines lyric essay, documentary image, and visual poetry to investigate origin, identity, and transformation. The multiple literary forms speak to the work's thematic preoccupations with 'camouflage and adaptability and shapeshifting, ' all concerns of the diasporic body. The author renames herself, moving the work beyond literary convention into performative, conceptual, and shamanistic contexts: 'The name I go by now is 'Ngoho.' It is a verb.' A verb expresses action. This is an active work by an active mind.--Amy Catanzano