Stories from the city / Isabelita Orlina Reyes.

The poets finds her language again within so that, from poem to poem, one encounters not language or text but a meaningfulness of living. -Gemino H. Abad ... a lovely book... [of a] cosmopolitan type of poetry... Some poems brought tears to my eyes. Others made me laugh. It's all there, the neon city outside [her] sliding door. And yes, the silence, too. -Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo Stories from the City is anything but urbane : these are brave and even cutting poems that do not balk at the idea of confronting racismsexism, classicism, disbelief, loveliness, ennui, death, and all the other verities attending contemporary urban existence. But ultimately, this book celebrates living in the city of our collective childhood-glittering with dream, paved with simple and uncompromising need, bustling with games of precious kinship-the city buried under the jaded wakefulness we shall, after reading this astonishing first collection, barely be able to call life. -J. Neil C. Garcia, poet and critic. These are careful, lucid, beautiful poems, Grounded in a specific place and on particular people, the poems are examinations of the self. Naked with self-conscious angst, irony and tenderness, they avow a difficult love for the world. -Trixie Alano Reguyal. Issy Orlina Reyes is a faculty member of the Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of the Philippines, Diliman, and is currently the copy editor of the Philippines Free Press.