Will you tell me what I look like? by Raphael Atienza Coronel

The longing to be perceived courses through will you tell me what I look like: its aggressive eloquence suggests as much; and its protean tonalities; its performances—linguistic, typographic, artistic—of elaboration, interruption, and revision. But the great vulnerabilities—mental illness, amorous frustration, the various estrangements of urban existence, grief—that propel this longing persistently thwart its fulfillment too, the collection iterating the difficulty of apprehending not-yet- or never-fully-articulable states of being and being with and being without without diminishing them in the process. In the ways it surfaces and sabotages scrutable selves and their societies, Raphael Coronel’s shapeshifting poetry is ever-alert and startling, ambitious and moving. — Mark Anthony Cayanan The poems of Raphael Coronel are exercises of faith, professed again and again, in the capacity of art and its making to become a world in which to perceive the self and the world. Confined in a body