M of the Southern Downpours

By: Alton Melvar M. Dapanas

M of the Southern Downpours is Alton Melvar M Dapanas' second collection of prose poems. Dapanas, a resident of the in-betweenness of genres and forms as a prose poet and lyric essayist, crafts a book of poems which are part unsent letter to the dead, part lyric topography of their hometown, and part poetic centones from urban literatures and place-writings of Mahmoud Darwish, Richard Siken, Yun Dong-ju, Vivek Shraya, Jody Chan, Golnoosh Nour, and Gaspar Orozco.

In this 'spellbook of poems', in the words of polyglot poet Kiran Bhat, Dapanas meditates on southern Philippine cityscapes: from the stretch of Velez Street to Sayre Highway's edge, from hotel fire exits to unpeopled bus stops along the coastal drive. In M of the Southern Downpours, readers find traces of various intertexts such as Conchitina Cruz's poetic sequence 'Geography Lesson, ' Taylor Swift's lyric discography (especially 'folklore' and 'evermore'), Donika Kelly's 'Sanctuary, ' and the incantations from Mamanwa mythos and old Catholic monodies in Binisaya sung during Lent. As queer scholar Wen-chi Li wrote, Dapanas' prose poems 'are both a tender embrace and a daring confession.'