The Future Is a Country I Do Not Live in

"In her enchanting collection of poems, Cynthia Buiza traces "the shape of memories, / the noise they make," with a delicate, uncompromising touch. Her calm, melodious lines push open the doors we tell ourselves we cannot open, doors to rooms that hold what we believe we cannot face - "mother, lover, loss." Distilled from years of longing and griefwork, of solitary walks and communal rituals, Buiza's wisdom is sweet wine for bitter times."

-Boris Dralyuk, poet, translator and Editor-in-Chief of Los Angeles Review of Books



"Cynthia Buiza's poetry continues to witness, unceasingly, inviting us to join her in what I call as the last vigil to a passing world, where despite the odds and doubts, she continues to recollect the tracks and thoughts of our fugitive, fragile lives, now enshrined in a foreign tongue she has recoiled and reconciled as her own domicile, a second skin."

-Kristian Sendon Cordero, poet and translator



"What does poetry look like from the notebooks of a life thoughtfully walked? These pages reflect the maturity of consequence, filled by a migrant advocate, world citizen, and a spirit who has held poetry long enough to understand its torrents. Poetry, for those who stroll outside its white walls, is a "miracle at dawn." And there are many miracles in this debut collection - language as a "dance between mercy and grace" - so much thinking, so much survival, so much courage, from a poet who paves her journey by documenting the everyday vanishings and appearances."

-Bino A. Realuyo, author of The Gods We Worship Live Next Door and co-founder of The Asian American Writers Workshop



"Many worlds collide in the poetry of Cynthia Buiza, but what remains with the reader are the worlds of the new country vis-a-vis the old homeland. Silt and silk, stone and star, a vast country and an archipelago "with too many names for islands." People suffer and live in her poems; violence and hope commingle here. "She maps this line of desolation from one continent to another..." It is a poetry teeming with images moist and melancholy, "ghosts frozen in the dead eye of memory." The rough-grained world of the everyday and the slippery world of dreams are present, "surfacing in her dreams/ trailed by a lullaby of crickets nesting... in secret places." This is an assured debut for a poet whose wise and wonderful voice deserves to be heard, loud and clear."

-Danton Remoto, author of Riverrun, A Novel, Winner of the National Achievement Award for Poetry, Writers' Union of the Philippines