Forthcoming Work
Liveright Press, 2023
THE DIASPORA SONNETS
“My father forfeits field and nation / and I dream nothing into these turning skies.” In 1972, after Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law, Oliver de la Paz’s father, in a last fit of desperation to leave the Philippines, threw his papers at an immigration clerk, hoping to get them stamped. He was prepared to leave, having already quit his job and exchanged pesos for dollars; but he couldn’t anticipate the migratory lifestyle he and his family would soon adopt in America. Their search for a sense of “home” is evocatively explored by award-winning poet de la Paz in this formally inventive collection of sonnets. Poems flit with dulcet lyricism and nostalgia from coast to coast, across prairies and deserts, along the way musing on shadowy dreams of a faraway country. With a virtuoso’s deft touch, The Diaspora Sonnets break and rejoin poetic tradition, powerfully capturing the peculiar pangs of a diaspora “that has left and is forever leaving.”
“There is no container more fitting to the conveyance of the nuanced sorrow of the permanent displacement from home, a word “ensnared with thorns,” than the sonnet, certainly as it is practiced by Oliver de la Paz, in metrical couplets, with shimmering music, “the syllables of story, // saying then, then, then,” and a splendorous catalog of details, acutely remembered, and gilded into metaphor. These are “blades of grass” people, surviving within the deprivation and alienation of diaspora, which exists in precarious counterpoint to the love that “proliferated / the way chimney swifts burrowed into // the old attic insulation.” The tenderness in these poems comes through in their “gradations of memory where one // belonged,” and in their penetrating artfulness, itself a kind of love.”
—Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets and winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Published Books
University of Akron Press, 2019
THE BOY IN THE LABYRINTH
(Finalist for the Mass Book Award)
Exquisite means, at its root, “carefully sought out,” and Oliver de la Paz’s The Boy in the Labyrinth is a book of desperate and careful seeking, a labyrinthine allegory through the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur at the center of the labyrinth, through algebraic story problems and Autism Screening Questionaires and their inscrutable questions and more inscrutable answers, for ways of understanding the neurodiverse mind and the mind that seeks to understand what de la Paz calls “the swirling cacophony” of a boy’s brain. These labyrinthine poems—mysterious, devastating, precise in their terror of the unknowable--take us deeper into the mystery of other—and our own—minds, the X no solution can fully solves. Heartbreaking in its longing and exquisite—in the modern sense of ‘consummate and delightful excellence’— in its gorgeous threads, Boy in the Labyrinth pays homage to the exquisite textures of human minds as they seek the ultimate confrontations with the very meaning of selfhood and mind.
—Bruce Beasley, author of All Soul Parts Returned
University of Akron Press,
2014
POST SUBJECT: A FABLE
Ecstatic and obsessive, the prose poems that make up Oliver de la Paz’s Post Subject: A Fable reveal the monuments of a lost country. Through a series of epistles addressed to "Empire" a catalog emerges, where what can be tallied is noted in a ledger, what can be claimed is demarcated, and what has been reaped is elided. The task of deposing the late century is taken up. What’s salvaged from the remains is humanity.
University of Akron Press, 2012
A FACE TO MEET THE FACES
Edited by Stacey Lynn Brown and Oliver de la Paz, the poems in A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry represent the intersection of tradition and possibility. The poets range in age and accolade and draw their inspiration from sources that are as disparate as the ways in which information is disseminated in our multimedia world. From ancient mythology to popular culture, from fairy tales to tabloids, the voices in these poems address a wide range of issues that are historical, contemporary, and ultimately timeless.
University of Akron Press, 2010
REQUIEM FOR THE ORCHARD
Oliver de la Paz’s Requiem for the Orchard is a love letter to memory and its ability to both sustain and shatter us beyond the “dust of ourselves, / cold, decisive, and purely from the earth.” de la Paz renders in beautiful and exacting language the tenderness and ferocity of boyhood, alongside the enduring vulnerability of parenthood. Out of such intimate recollection a generous wisdom blossoms.
—Martìn Espada, author of Floaters and winner of the National Book Award
Southern Illinois University Press, 2007
FURIOUS LULLABY
Furious Lullaby is both a celebration of and a eulogy to the body in the twenty-first century. The collection, which examines the larger concepts of salvation and temptation in a world of blossoming strife, includes a series of aubades – dramatic poems culminating with the separation of lovers at dawn. The lovers suffer a metaphysical crisis, seeking to know what is good, what is evil, and how to truly know the difference. Knowing, however, requires that they invite the truly terrible into their world. The Devil, a seductive trickster, haunts the landscape as a voice who dares each inquisitor to learn about mortality, morality, the beautiful, and the terrible through direct experience. Furious Lullaby offers a departure from the lighter prose poetry of de la Paz’s Names above Houses and preserves the author’s concern with the nature of human grace.
—Jon Pineda, author of The Translator’s Diary
Southern Illinois University Press, 2001
NAMES ABOVE HOUSES
“Oliver de la Paz has created a unique work: a novella in the form of a sequence of prose poems; a lucidly inventive allegory of migration, exile, and belonging. With grace and elegance, he evokes the magical, myth-making culture of his Philippines and brings it to a very real California in the person of Fidelito, a boy who wants to fly, and his parents, Domingo and Maria Elena. Oliver de la Paz has the strength and wisdom to step lightly with the heaviest burdens. He is stunningly good. Names above Houses celebrates the trials and indestructibility of a family and is a durable refreshment, an essential document of life at the cultural crossroads.”
—Rodney Jones, author of Elegy for the Southern Drawl
Selected Anthologies
Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Writing
Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation
Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation
Language for New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond
From the Fishouse:An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great
Poetry: A Writers' Guide and Anthology
