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How to Make a Salagubang Helicopter & other poems
Jim Pascual Agustin has created a distinct, challenging, and necessary collection of poetry that successfully weaves together inner lives and the larger entities surrounding us. How to Make a Salagubang Helicopter & other poems is undeniably a product of its time, made necessary for the challenges it poses upon the reader—challenges the narrator quietly rallies the reader to take on, against the chaos we are already, unfortunately, growing comfortable with. The poetry possesses an undercurrent of begrudging stillness and stoicism—this quiet voice, with every line that falls, wonders whether humanity is still worthy of championing.
LINKS TO ONLINE OR PRINT REVIEWS
Philippines Graphic
https://philippinesgraphic.net/south-...
Philippine Star
https://www.philstar.com/lifestyle/bu...
LINKS TO ONLINE OR PRINT REVIEWS
Philippines Graphic
https://philippinesgraphic.net/south-...
Philippine Star
https://www.philstar.com/lifestyle/bu...
114 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 22, 2018
2 people are currently reading
45 people want to read
About the author
Jim Pascual Agustin
20 books84 followersJim Pascual Agustin was born in the Philippines.
Winner of the 2022 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize winner for his manuscript WAKING UP TO THE PATTERN LEFT BY A SNAIL OVERNIGHT, published in March/April 2023.
His previous book is BLOODRED DRAGONFLIES (Deep South). BLUR OF A DOG is forthcoming from his Philippine publisher, San Anselmo Press, which released his two other collections - HOW TO MAKE A SALAGUBANG HELICOPTER & other poems and CROCODILES IN BELFAST & other poems.
His early years were spent in a communal house where he struggled to remember all the names of his numerous cousins. His family was forced out of their land to make way for the construction of a highway named after the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
He owes his love for literature to the late Irish-American priest, Fr. James O'Brien, SJ. Jim was a Fellow of the University of the Philippines Writers Workshop and the Iligan University Writers Workshop. In October 1994, he moved to Cape Town, South Africa.
He has a number of poetry books published by the University of Santo Tomas Publishing House. In 2011, Baha-bahagdang Karupukan (Filipino collection) and Alien to Any Skin (English collection) were simultaneously released.
Blogs for these two books are: www.karupukan.wordpress.com and www.alientoanyskin.wordpress.com
In 2013, Kalmot ng Pusa sa Tagiliran and Sound Before Water were published. 2015 saw the release A Thousand Eyes. His first collection of short stories in Filipino, Sanga sa Basang Lupa, was released in 2016 and has been selected by renowned Filipino novelist Edgar Calabia Samar among the notable books of recent memory.
WINGS OF SMOKE, his eighth poetry book, was released in 2017 by UK publisher The Onslaught Press.
In his adopted country of South Africa he has won second prize in the 2013 New Coin DALRO Poetry Prize and third prize at the 2014 and 2015 Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Award.
Please contact the author through his blog, www.matangmanok.wordpress.com if you are interested in any of his work.
Winner of the 2022 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize winner for his manuscript WAKING UP TO THE PATTERN LEFT BY A SNAIL OVERNIGHT, published in March/April 2023.
His previous book is BLOODRED DRAGONFLIES (Deep South). BLUR OF A DOG is forthcoming from his Philippine publisher, San Anselmo Press, which released his two other collections - HOW TO MAKE A SALAGUBANG HELICOPTER & other poems and CROCODILES IN BELFAST & other poems.
His early years were spent in a communal house where he struggled to remember all the names of his numerous cousins. His family was forced out of their land to make way for the construction of a highway named after the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
He owes his love for literature to the late Irish-American priest, Fr. James O'Brien, SJ. Jim was a Fellow of the University of the Philippines Writers Workshop and the Iligan University Writers Workshop. In October 1994, he moved to Cape Town, South Africa.
He has a number of poetry books published by the University of Santo Tomas Publishing House. In 2011, Baha-bahagdang Karupukan (Filipino collection) and Alien to Any Skin (English collection) were simultaneously released.
Blogs for these two books are: www.karupukan.wordpress.com and www.alientoanyskin.wordpress.com
In 2013, Kalmot ng Pusa sa Tagiliran and Sound Before Water were published. 2015 saw the release A Thousand Eyes. His first collection of short stories in Filipino, Sanga sa Basang Lupa, was released in 2016 and has been selected by renowned Filipino novelist Edgar Calabia Samar among the notable books of recent memory.
WINGS OF SMOKE, his eighth poetry book, was released in 2017 by UK publisher The Onslaught Press.
In his adopted country of South Africa he has won second prize in the 2013 New Coin DALRO Poetry Prize and third prize at the 2014 and 2015 Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Award.
Please contact the author through his blog, www.matangmanok.wordpress.com if you are interested in any of his work.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 22, 2025
Toward a Poetics of Alienation: On Jim Pascual Agustin’s Pieces Meant to Fit
I had intended, at the outset, to write on Jim Pascual Agustin’s collection as a whole. JPA is most often situated within the sphere of the political poet: a chronicler of upheaval, a persistent critic of Marcos Sr., and of Duterte’s murderous war on drugs. Yet the surprise of Pieces Meant to Fit, the collection’s opening sequence, is how deftly it turns from public witness to the intimacies of loss, longing, and estrangement. Here, the political poet reveals himself equally as cartographer of the heart’s disquiet.
The fourteen poems that comprise this section enact a poetics of mirroring, what might be called a mimetic play of fragments. Each piece suggests irregularity—paper hearts cut askew, broken bodies refracted in glass—but within their fractures lies a precise rendering of affect.
Alienation serves as the central motif. In Imagining Aliens, a boy looks skyward in search of the extraordinary, even as the true “alien” lies embedded beneath his own skin. The anticipated encounter with otherness becomes deferred, perpetually estranged. Similarly, Falling in Reverse refracts a road accident into a symbolic convergence of heaven and earth. The truck driver’s lost livelihood collides with his deferred dream of becoming a pilot, staged in a cinematic slow motion that renders catastrophe almost sublime. This dream sequence resonates with Where To, Little Swallow, where a bird—part shard of sky, part Eucharistic manna—hovers at a window, confronting the reader with a fragile dialectic between enclosure and flight, confinement and transcendence.
The image of the heart, recurrently folded, ghosted, or broken, becomes a paper-thin locus of mimesis. In Ghost Knocking, the speaker, having been ghosted, inhabits the role of ghost, knocking upon his own absence. The metaphor condenses alienation into embodiment: the self estranged from itself. Birds and feathers, JPA’s favored tropes, further this mirroring of desolation—the frantic beating of wings as analogue to the restless, abandoned heart.
In Breathing Hole, the heart is reimagined as a suitcase punctured with a single vent, barely able to breathe. The metaphor insists on the weight of emotional baggage, but also suggests a necessary aperture, however narrow. One cannot help but imagine, as the poem invites, a heart the size of a whale, exhaling a solitary song into a vast and uncomprehending sea. The heart, indeed, is figured as “a lonely hunter.”
Yet the sequence does not conclude in despair. In Lines and Circle, JPA gestures toward the persistence of grace within fracture:
“It is rare to see a smile behind a window shattered by a rock. But it happens. And you never know until the last jitters of frame.”
This brief moment of radiance tempers the desolation, insisting that hope, however fragile, remains. The mimetic arc bends not only toward loss but toward the possibility of renewal.
Such mirroring, as strategy and motif, will continue into the next section of the collection, The Human Link, whose ekphrastic explorations warrant a separate reading.
I had intended, at the outset, to write on Jim Pascual Agustin’s collection as a whole. JPA is most often situated within the sphere of the political poet: a chronicler of upheaval, a persistent critic of Marcos Sr., and of Duterte’s murderous war on drugs. Yet the surprise of Pieces Meant to Fit, the collection’s opening sequence, is how deftly it turns from public witness to the intimacies of loss, longing, and estrangement. Here, the political poet reveals himself equally as cartographer of the heart’s disquiet.
The fourteen poems that comprise this section enact a poetics of mirroring, what might be called a mimetic play of fragments. Each piece suggests irregularity—paper hearts cut askew, broken bodies refracted in glass—but within their fractures lies a precise rendering of affect.
Alienation serves as the central motif. In Imagining Aliens, a boy looks skyward in search of the extraordinary, even as the true “alien” lies embedded beneath his own skin. The anticipated encounter with otherness becomes deferred, perpetually estranged. Similarly, Falling in Reverse refracts a road accident into a symbolic convergence of heaven and earth. The truck driver’s lost livelihood collides with his deferred dream of becoming a pilot, staged in a cinematic slow motion that renders catastrophe almost sublime. This dream sequence resonates with Where To, Little Swallow, where a bird—part shard of sky, part Eucharistic manna—hovers at a window, confronting the reader with a fragile dialectic between enclosure and flight, confinement and transcendence.
The image of the heart, recurrently folded, ghosted, or broken, becomes a paper-thin locus of mimesis. In Ghost Knocking, the speaker, having been ghosted, inhabits the role of ghost, knocking upon his own absence. The metaphor condenses alienation into embodiment: the self estranged from itself. Birds and feathers, JPA’s favored tropes, further this mirroring of desolation—the frantic beating of wings as analogue to the restless, abandoned heart.
In Breathing Hole, the heart is reimagined as a suitcase punctured with a single vent, barely able to breathe. The metaphor insists on the weight of emotional baggage, but also suggests a necessary aperture, however narrow. One cannot help but imagine, as the poem invites, a heart the size of a whale, exhaling a solitary song into a vast and uncomprehending sea. The heart, indeed, is figured as “a lonely hunter.”
Yet the sequence does not conclude in despair. In Lines and Circle, JPA gestures toward the persistence of grace within fracture:
“It is rare to see a smile behind a window shattered by a rock. But it happens. And you never know until the last jitters of frame.”
This brief moment of radiance tempers the desolation, insisting that hope, however fragile, remains. The mimetic arc bends not only toward loss but toward the possibility of renewal.
Such mirroring, as strategy and motif, will continue into the next section of the collection, The Human Link, whose ekphrastic explorations warrant a separate reading.
May 10, 2019
"It’s always tricky to read poetry, more so to read it for the sake of reviewing it. There’s the concept of the author being dead—that once the last line is typed, the work now belongs to the reader, open to any kind of interpretation. And yet, an overthinker like me would worry, what if I misinterpret what the author intended to evoke?
Still, the themes in How to Make Salagubang Helicopter are so distinctly clear, covering poems drawn from personal experience and observation to timely sections (perfectly titled “Abominations,” my personal favorite chapter) dedicated to making sense of the senseless decisions and actions made by the current administration. Agustin even manages to make hard-hitting poetry out of the government’s documents (“victimize mostly the underprivileged / and impoverished sector / of society / eradicate” from Redacted Official Document No. 1) and from news coverage (“The police / armed with lists / altered / the body / brutalized / to public acceptance.” from Mangling Miguel Syjuco’s Words).
And while some writers prefer to keep an air of mystery around their sources of inspiration, it was refreshing to see photographs included in the book, credited by Agustin as prompts used for his poetry. “The Keys are in Someone Else’s Pocket” especially hit home with my tear ducts, showing a somber photograph of a war veteran waiting outside a bank combined with beautiful lines hypothesizing on its subject’s life." Continue reading our review here.
Please note: We don't use ratings but for this purpose, we tag books with three stars by default.
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Still, the themes in How to Make Salagubang Helicopter are so distinctly clear, covering poems drawn from personal experience and observation to timely sections (perfectly titled “Abominations,” my personal favorite chapter) dedicated to making sense of the senseless decisions and actions made by the current administration. Agustin even manages to make hard-hitting poetry out of the government’s documents (“victimize mostly the underprivileged / and impoverished sector / of society / eradicate” from Redacted Official Document No. 1) and from news coverage (“The police / armed with lists / altered / the body / brutalized / to public acceptance.” from Mangling Miguel Syjuco’s Words).
And while some writers prefer to keep an air of mystery around their sources of inspiration, it was refreshing to see photographs included in the book, credited by Agustin as prompts used for his poetry. “The Keys are in Someone Else’s Pocket” especially hit home with my tear ducts, showing a somber photograph of a war veteran waiting outside a bank combined with beautiful lines hypothesizing on its subject’s life." Continue reading our review here.
Please note: We don't use ratings but for this purpose, we tag books with three stars by default.
Would like to be a reviewer/contributor to Bookbed? Sign up here!
We also accept review requests. More info here.
May 17, 2019
I love how the poet's words are both simple yet they pack a punch by the time you get to the ending. He talks about the seemingly mundane (playing games during brownout, a dead bird) to matters that capture the heart (a war veteran waiting for a bank to open, an old woman praying in church) to issues that hit the headlines (Alex Tizon's article, "My Family's Slave" published in The Atlantic, a little girl who was a victim of the drug war in the Philippines). Mr. Agustin's gift is that he seems to be merely describing yet he is actually giving the reader gems of insights that linger in the mind long after one has experienced the power of his words.
August 9, 2023
As a whole, I personally think the poems were arranged in a way that's easy to digest. The first chapter focuses more on the author's personal life and gradually shifts to talk more about the greater powers outside of his life, just like it says on the blurb. One of the things I really loved about this book is how it captures the local color. It's very much a product of its time and encapsulates the events that have taken place in the country, allowing readers to experience them from a more personal and intimate perspective.
June 28, 2022
With eyes closed, you desire
To wake up in another world. Not this, alone.
The way back is not the way
Home. This, you keep forgetting.
To wake up in another world. Not this, alone.
The way back is not the way
Home. This, you keep forgetting.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews