About the Book

These poems depict all the differences and changes that a Filipino immigrant experienced while living in the United States. Every poem in this book strongly tells about how it is to live in a foreign land. It reflects a point of view that most immigrants feel especially during their first few years of residence in the US.

This book is all about the life of an immigrant captured in poems: colorful, magical, nostalgic and challenging.

A SOCIETY FOR RENT


Why can’t we afford to live in our own?
We live a borrowed life in a rented community
We ride in a metered journey
We work through a graded career
We eat with bar codes constricting the transfat content
We drink by grids, which say moderately
We sit for dinner on bank loans, mortgages and lay-aways
We die in the land we weren’t born
We pay not by our money but through credit
We do everything in a rehearsed dialogue
Everything goes by the paper
We sign the contract and pay the price
But the price is not ours.