Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous by Mark Anthony Cayanan

About the book: Palimpsests, discrete yet linked episodes, trivia and gossip amidst tensions and complexities of bourgeois daily life, halting meditations on the transcendent power of art and its terrors, all combine to give amplified utterance to Cayanan’s aptly titled Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous. This poetic “lengthy sigh” consists of many voices held in place by a deconstructed, reconstructed Aschenbach whose fears, doubts, and desires are visibly recognizable in present-day global concerns, not least on youth and beauty, sexuality, trauma, and disease. Amidst an excess of complementary voices, both direct and oblique, a self that is engaged yet disengaged from melodrama, folk belief, bullet-holed scenes of political violence “through which futures have escaped” bookends these poems seemingly. In dismantling poetic traditions but also in their retention and continuation, in a deft reliance on the associative, organic nature of thought and emotion, Cayanan offers artful testimo