"‘To be other is to read badly-/drawn maps,’ writes Ina Cariño, ‘to hum / with a revolutionary's love song.’ I love the vividness of these poems, the language of the senses that's so alive on each page of FEAST. But these poems aren't just beautiful, sensual lyrics. There is more at stake here. Cariño is a kind of poet who claims family and identity with style that's akin to spell-making. ‘I dream in a tongue not my own’ the poet says—and we see it instantly: Here, even a simple act of cooking rice can become a ceremony, a rhapsody of liberation. All of this is done not with literary pretension but with vulnerability and honesty. If Ina Cariño says ‘names are spells,’ it is because this poet aims to write actual spells, and not just with the pen, but with breath: ‘I am the last spell, the only song left. deliberate utterance of bone’. Here, we are in presence of something special, I think. Bravo.”

—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

Ina Cariño is a Filipinx American poet with an MFA in creative writing from North Carolina State University. Their poetry appears in Waxwing, New England Review, and Tupelo Quarterly, among other journals. Ina is a Kundiman fellow and a recipient of a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. In December of 2019, they founded a reading series, Indigena Collective, centering marginalized creatives in the community. Through their writing, Ina explores intergenerational nourishment, and the transformation of the brown body through space + time.

Alice James Books, 2023

6” x 9”, paperback

80 pages