Hello! I’d like to pull back the curtain a little bit on how this book came to be.
When I told my loved ones that my first full-length poetry collection was set to launch on the 1st of March, I took some baby shower-type pride in announcing that my baby would be a Pisces. It seemed right — my baby is a sensitive thing, navel-gaze-y with a little free time, prone to tears. It expresses its love by keeping you company when you feel alone. That’s the point of most art, y’know! To make you feel less alone.
Sculpting the manuscript took about seven years. Shortly after college I became a poetry fellow for a couple of national workshops, which I — like a lot of my friends and contemporaries — regarded at the time with such starry-eyed amazement as thee milestones that defined the archetypal journey of becoming a full-fledged writer. About five years ago, a lowkey watershed piece called “Unsilencing the Writing Workshop” came out to investigate and problematize the accepted method of literary workshopping, which was basically to sit quietly and watch your panelists and co-fellows dissect your work. Live surgery with no anesthesia. Ask around for workshop horror stories and you’re bound to find a few unlucky survivors who’ve had their writing torn to shreds by some uppity padrino with a god complex. The article makes salient points on how patriarchal and rigidly formalist the workshop structure can be, but I take some perverse pride in the idea that I and my work were run through the wringer in that way. “You wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me,” as they say lmao. So when I was in those workshops, I was culling the herd, working on the strongest pieces and jettisoning the weakest. “Prayer Study 2” and “The Age of Aquarius” were two poems that made the cut in this way. The underlying teaching of these workshops, I think, is that all that blood and breakage has to culminate in a book. I keep in touch with a handful of friends from that time, and we look back at all that with the sober bewilderment of like, why did any of that shit matter.
The writing process, I intended to carry our organically. Calls for submission from different journals would light a fire under my ass to get to work, but otherwise, for years I wrote when the mood struck me. “Last Will and Testament of an Influencer,” IIRC, was one such grass-fed, free-range poem that came to be with this strategy. “Writer’s block” in my opinion isn’t an obstacle to manage with good habits and an upstanding lifestyle, but a natural nothing-state of day-to-day life that occasionally gets interrupted by inspiration, whenever it comes. I understand you’re not allowed to think this way if you’re taking a masters or something, but I was over here being employed and shit, like a sane person.
There was a brief period though when I was writing furiously. When my dad passed away in 2017 to cancer, I was under the impression that there is a correct protocol to pain, that metabolizing the grief properly meant pouring all of it into writing, which needed to be good, which needed to be in a book. All that blood and breakage, etc. A lot of wine, during this time! Not romantic. Kinda gross. I don’t recommend it. For what it’s worth, it was during this time that the book’s true thematic scaffolding of grief and loss began to take a shape. The first poem of the book, “Isaac Prepares to Sacrifice Abraham,” was written during this time.
The painful parts of the process are honestly the boring bits. For what it’s worth, I had a lot of fun setting free verse to the side for a minute and trying my hand at fixed forms! “Remoteness” is a villanelle, “Echo Duplex” is named after the duplex form invented by Jericho Brown, and “Holy Diver Sestina” is of course a sestina, a maddeningly exact form popularized by poets like Elizabeth Bishop. (That’s something I heard a lot at the workshops I was in, for some reason. Read Elizabeth Bishop, read Elizabeth Bishop.) Fixed forms are designed the way they are, I think, to chase after a specific sonic effect, and the acrobatic work of starting one and finishing one felt like sticking the landing of a complicated routine. So much of “Nail Down the Sky” is meant to be sonically invigorating, and I believe those fixed forms are the most qualified to demonstrate that conceit. Quite a few rhymes in the book, too! More writers should rhyme more, shit is fun.
After I put together a half decent manuscript, I contacted Stefani Tran, an old blockmate of mine whom I consider to be the best writer of our batch, bar none. I knew Stef did a lot of work as an editor and sensitivity reader, and I got in touch with her to check if I was handling certain delicate themes (e.g. self-harm, sui***** ideation) carefully. I relish our email correspondences, and all her wit and eagle eye insights. I still have the google doc link with her comments in the margins. It was Stef who suggested a page of content warnings for the book, which I readily agreed to. I had a brief conversation with Katrina Santiago of Everything’s Fine (my publisher!) about this, and her concern that the inclusion of such a page might diminish the book’s impact. Good literature is supposed to shake you up, after all! I do believe though that a page of content warnings takes nothing away from a book, as long as that shit is good. So much of a book’s greatness can be owed to its editor, and I’m endlessly thankful to Stef for catching the slivers of sky that I couldn’t.
It’s funny now to think that I basically cold emailed Everything’s Fine about considering my little manuscript for publishing. Katrina Santiago and Oliver Ortega really took a chance on me, giving this poetry collection a chance even though prose was more their jam as a business. Katrina spoke effusively with me about how much she loved the collection while emphasizing the importance of quality paper for the book, which gave me a lot of confidence. The inimitable Renzo Navarro (who has an incredible show at Tarzeer Pictures called “Who Needs A Blade?” ongoing till June 6!) was the one responsible for the book’s cover. I was a big fan of his warm, painterly landscapes, which is what I initially had in mind for the book, but he pitched a breathtaking image of an intangible hand seizing at a fabric’s wrinkle, and I couldn’t ask for anything better to communicate the book’s tendency to grasp at ephemeral things. It was Oliver who suggested the book’s neon green back and vivid red spine, which just felt very rock ‘n’ roll to me. I remarked to Oliver that a lot of the book’s themes have to do with nauseating clarity, so the almost sickening brightness of neon green felt right.
What can I say about the book’s launch? It was filled with love, there was whisky and wine and a cheese board, and it was filled with love, and I took a few shots at how hilariously bad Richard Siken is at being online, and it was filled with love. You just had to be there.
I’m writing to you now two months after the book’s release, a little hungover, I guess. A lot of shit happened between then and now, a lot of which I’d rather talk about face to face. If you happen to pick the book up, thank you in advance for the generosity of your time and attention. If you’re reading it now, I hope it makes you feel less alone.
I’m still processing the wildness at the fact that I wanted this for seven years, and I’m thirty now, and the book exists, and what I wanna really do now is embark on a new chapter of my life and write the next book. I remarked to Mags at the launch that I’ve gotten all the sorrow out of the way for this one, so the next book will be about joy. That is still the plan.
Nail Down the Sky is available now at the Everything’s Fine bookstore. You can also order it on Lazada.