Post Subject: A Fable (Akron Series in Poetry

by Oliver de la Paz

Ecstatic and obsessive, the prose poems that make up Oliver de la Paz’s Post A Fable reveal the monuments of a lost country. Through a series of epistles addressed to "Empire" a catalog emerges, where what can be tallied is noted in a ledger, what can be claimed is demarcated, and what has been reaped is elided. The task of deposing the late century is taken up. What’s salvaged from the remains is humanity.

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2014

About the author

Oliver de la Paz was born in Manila, Philippines, and raised in Ontario, Oregon. He received his MFA from Arizona State University and has taught creative writing at Arizona State University, Gettysburg College, Utica College, Western Washington University, the College of the Holy Cross, and the Low-Res MFA Program at Pacific Lutheran University. His work has appeared in journals such as Quarterly West, North American Review, Third Coast, Asian Pacific American Journal, Poetry, New England Review, Tinhouse, in the anthology Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation .and elsewhere. Names Above Houses, a book of his prose and verse, was a winner of the 2000 Crab Orchard Award Series and was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2001. His second book,Furious Lullaby, was published in 2007 by Southern Illinois University Press. And his third book, Requiem for the Orchard won the University of Akron Prize in 2009. Additionally he authored Post Subject: A Fable and co-edited A Face to Meet the Faces: Contemporary Persona Poetry with the author Stacy Lynn Brown. His most recent book is The Boy in the Labyrinth, published by the University of Akron Press which allegorically chronicles parenting sons on the Autism Spectrum through parable, myth, and academic questionnaires.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really love these poems. Each begins with the words: “Dear Empire” - brilliant. The poet invites us to look at empire through the on the ground view. It works. Excellently.

[John Vanderslice · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a seriously impressive, even profound, book. Almost every one of these prose poems demonstrates riveting, crystalline images, images so unique and so beautifully rendered that they take your breath away. Even more impressive is the overall "argument" or approach to the book: a series of letters to a divine, or at least all-powerful, figure (God?), letters intended to bring the facts of this figures "empire" to the attention of him or her (Him or Her?). The figure is absent and does not seem to realize what He or She has left behind, not only the understated beauty of it but its sadness, its longing, its need. Sad another way, the figure does not seem to realize the damage He or She has caused in leaving the empire behind. It's the poet's self-assigned task to make such matters clear. I love it.

[Kent]

To my mind, this book interacts with Mark Strand's Dark Harbor and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. At least in the nature of empire and landscape--this darkened place whose vague contours and deep image significances build a menacing presence for the reader. However, de la Paz's Filipino identity complicates any address to "Empire," and it's this part of the book that I'm consistently marveling at. This is Marco Polo reporting to an emperor about the far reaches of his empire (a borderland the emperor slowly admits he will never be able to visit), these are letters written to the overarching power describing itself to itself. Who are they from? The writer's identity remains as vague as the actual landscape. But the menacing, portentous landscape is constant.