The Experiment of the Tropics: Poems

by Lawrence Lacambra Ypil

**Finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards**

Longlisted for The Believer Book Awards , 2020!

Named 1 of 6 must-read poetry books in April 2019 by The Millions.

The co-winner of the inaugural Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize.



Through the lens of history and photography, The Experiment of the Tropics returns to early-twentieth-century Philippines during American occupation and asks, "How does one look at the past?"



By braiding the music of anthropology with the intimacy of the lyric, Lawrence Ypil explores history's archives and excavates a city, both real and imagined, that is constituted by the shimmer of petal and porch, coral and brass--a river-refrigerator where women catch their reflections on the sheen of magazines and men lean against the walls of old houses and beckon, come here. So, we approach.



Spare, musical, and erotic, The Experiment of the Tropics uses the intersection of text and image to meditate on the nature of a city and its longing, the revelatory power of photography, and the startling capacity of poetry to cut into the violent but redemptive parts of history.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2019

Reviews

[Cyril Wong · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ypil writes, ‘A parade is a way of walking around a town without leaving.’ The poet refuses to leave old photographs of Cebu alone. In a parade or lyrical pageantry of aphoristic, ekphrastic ruminations, the book becomes a haunted meditation on time passing, hinting compassionately at lives left unfinished and undocumented desires. Literal images transform into semantic palimpsests layered over by fragments of thought and psychological revelation.

[Andrew H · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lawrence Ypil’s first volume, The Highest Hiding Place (2009) was awarded the Madrigal-Gonzalez/University of the Philippines Best First Book Award (2011). His second book of poetry, The Experiment of the Tropics (2019), has achieved the inaugural Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize. Not surprisingly, these two awards identify Ypil as a writer whose work originates in Asia. The Experiment of the Tropics takes the Philippines as its framework and reaches out intellectually and lyrically to ask pertinent questions about colonialism and identity: it is a volume with global appeal. The triumph of Ypil’s latest work is that it avoids the closed rhetoric of identity politics and offers a sensuous poetry that opens up: unfurls with wonder. Sexual identity is a significant strand in this volume and one that harmonises with the whole. Ypil has a marvellous sense of orality, the mouth and its sexual energy, and how words become music on the page. To read The Experiment of the Tropics is to enter into an experience that absorbs and extends the imagination.

[m.t_spaces · Rating 5 out of 5]

Being of Filipino descent, this collection moved me. It was as if I were dropped into the book. I hung onto every word as if they were my family, my friends. Throughout Ypil’s pieces, I was him. Looking in. His words are artful and vivid, and I enjoyed how he included old photographs to clarify what the imagination already held. I hope to read more from Ypil.

[Zymon · Rating 4 out of 5]

“A street is a way of watching a movie when you don’t have money. A picture is a happy place of somewhere far enough to think it will be better when you’re there,” writes Lawrence Lacambra Ypil, who muses in this second poetry collection on the city as sites of memory, and photographs as evidence of memory. Through ekphrasis, he furnishes descriptions and stories about Filipinos who lived during the American occupation. The objective is to present selected pictures of ordinary lives as dramatically as possible, perhaps to enrich the experience and add meaning to the gestures, expressions, and perspectives provided. Several natures of a city are ultimately offered, and around these natures people in the tropics move, shape, and define their lives.

[Jenina · Rating 4 out of 5]

what reading a palimpsest feels like, seen through capiz window panels