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Modus
- GenresPoetry
176 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2022
1 person is currently reading
39 people want to read
About the author
Conchitina R. Cruz
9 books61 followersConchitina R. Cruz is Professor at the Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of the Philippines Diliman. She received her PhD in English from State University of New York (SUNY) Albany.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
April 10, 2022
"your fuck kisses are love kisses on occasion"
of course, i am a little biased. i'v been a big fan of Cruz's oeuvre, i've read everything, wrote lines from her poems on the margins of my other books, used them for playlist descriptions, dedicated them to a boy or two. i've been on the precipice of this book's release since it was announced.
i would like to make a well-gestured warning that if anyone wants to start chigbee's work, this is not the first text they should begin with. dark hours is the most accessible, elsewhere held and lingered and there is no emergency are for the seasoned poetry consumer.
modus is a little different from the rest—brave and daunting from reckoning, would often make the unprepared reader raise a brow or crease a forehead. there are 12 poems, but in the meat of reading, sometimes i forget the lines are from the poem at all. aside from the poem "poetry" and "minor figure", the poems' lines often lead itself astray. some lines are syntactically complete, some are not and leads itself to the next, some are jarringly different from the rest. a page can fit at most six or seven lines, usually just five, and the language is sparse but heavy—there is so much nothing that it often becomes everything it needs to be.
i think i read somewhere that in the writing process for this collection, some poems self-published in other zines, that chingbee was writing these, intentionally short, in the midst of doing other things. perhaps her own method O'Hara's "Lunch Poems", writing in slivers of time. i started thinking that the twelve "poems" in the table of content are just minicollections of the short poems themselves.
if anyone has read "there is no emergency" and remembered her alluring 5-line poems, then they're already acquainted to her minimal verses. these are short, but i give it to chingbee, she always compels me to go "mmm", nod my head, and reread lines, sometimes thrice over. i think this collection, as much as it is a passionately written body of work, is also chingbee's way of expressing her sentiments on poetry itself. she doesn't take herself too seriously, and the poems, sometimes, at least to me, comes across witty, a nod or allusion to something she wants to say but knitted behind her web of rhetorics. she's a poet who knows her field is cutthroat, maybe even corrosive, not only to the readers but to the writers themselves. "what did i miss? / i can't wait to read your next acceptance letter."
cleverly, wittily, and charmingly put. these poems are themselves critiques of poetry—often bluntly through content, such as in "poetry", but also in its form. the way these poems are presented would make a poet who attends workshops on the daily, abides themselves to objective-correlatives, and whisper the words they write out loud to remember where the stress syllable is, turn their head. chingbee's poetic praxis, dated from her first published collection, beckons the question: what is poetry? everything, chingbee says through her work, everything is poetry. multiple choices, catalogs, margins, lists, paperdolls, footnotes. chingbee's poetry is everything as much as it is nothing at all. recommending this to everyone up for a quick, fun, and challenging read.
some favorite parts:
"are you going to smash your face with your fist? / if you can tell yourself apart, by all means." p 9
"so you don't love me anymore, etc." p 15
"i can be forgiving on cue." p 61
the entirety of page 69 (was this intentional? then again, does it matter?)
"i thought it was a poem / but it won an award / cheers to your militant vision." p 77
"in poems i need to know which side you're on." p 98
"our elaborate alibis meet halway." p 147
of course, i am a little biased. i'v been a big fan of Cruz's oeuvre, i've read everything, wrote lines from her poems on the margins of my other books, used them for playlist descriptions, dedicated them to a boy or two. i've been on the precipice of this book's release since it was announced.
i would like to make a well-gestured warning that if anyone wants to start chigbee's work, this is not the first text they should begin with. dark hours is the most accessible, elsewhere held and lingered and there is no emergency are for the seasoned poetry consumer.
modus is a little different from the rest—brave and daunting from reckoning, would often make the unprepared reader raise a brow or crease a forehead. there are 12 poems, but in the meat of reading, sometimes i forget the lines are from the poem at all. aside from the poem "poetry" and "minor figure", the poems' lines often lead itself astray. some lines are syntactically complete, some are not and leads itself to the next, some are jarringly different from the rest. a page can fit at most six or seven lines, usually just five, and the language is sparse but heavy—there is so much nothing that it often becomes everything it needs to be.
i think i read somewhere that in the writing process for this collection, some poems self-published in other zines, that chingbee was writing these, intentionally short, in the midst of doing other things. perhaps her own method O'Hara's "Lunch Poems", writing in slivers of time. i started thinking that the twelve "poems" in the table of content are just minicollections of the short poems themselves.
if anyone has read "there is no emergency" and remembered her alluring 5-line poems, then they're already acquainted to her minimal verses. these are short, but i give it to chingbee, she always compels me to go "mmm", nod my head, and reread lines, sometimes thrice over. i think this collection, as much as it is a passionately written body of work, is also chingbee's way of expressing her sentiments on poetry itself. she doesn't take herself too seriously, and the poems, sometimes, at least to me, comes across witty, a nod or allusion to something she wants to say but knitted behind her web of rhetorics. she's a poet who knows her field is cutthroat, maybe even corrosive, not only to the readers but to the writers themselves. "what did i miss? / i can't wait to read your next acceptance letter."
cleverly, wittily, and charmingly put. these poems are themselves critiques of poetry—often bluntly through content, such as in "poetry", but also in its form. the way these poems are presented would make a poet who attends workshops on the daily, abides themselves to objective-correlatives, and whisper the words they write out loud to remember where the stress syllable is, turn their head. chingbee's poetic praxis, dated from her first published collection, beckons the question: what is poetry? everything, chingbee says through her work, everything is poetry. multiple choices, catalogs, margins, lists, paperdolls, footnotes. chingbee's poetry is everything as much as it is nothing at all. recommending this to everyone up for a quick, fun, and challenging read.
some favorite parts:
"are you going to smash your face with your fist? / if you can tell yourself apart, by all means." p 9
"so you don't love me anymore, etc." p 15
"i can be forgiving on cue." p 61
the entirety of page 69 (was this intentional? then again, does it matter?)
"i thought it was a poem / but it won an award / cheers to your militant vision." p 77
"in poems i need to know which side you're on." p 98
"our elaborate alibis meet halway." p 147
March 2, 2024
4.5 — this is so fucking good, or here is a long list of my favorite lines.
"you look like you would make me suffer for your art / I'll try anything thrice / ... / my unsmiling proxy sends their regards"
"ill have a bittersweet paradox / if that's what you're having"
"i thought it was a poem / but i just wanted a grave from my tiny guilt"
"you mean more to me than creative sadness"
"may i liaison between your state of underdress?"
"finally, ill draw the line between epigraph and epitaph"
"i take a drag from the margins you leave blank"
"i am beside myself with artful feeling / may i be excused from the revolution before rush hour?"
"so you don't love me anymore, etc. / rest assured, this matter is not being taken lightly."
"that collarbone is a cautionary tale"
"we swerve into the overgrown garden / your wildest assumptions get the better of me"
"the synonyms misbehaved like bad habits"
"i waited for you to come back / it was an exercise of hostility"
"ill use forgiveness as an excuse to see you again
"let me overexplain a clear conscience."
pp. 70-71
"i plifer delusions by stanza"
"you look like you would make me suffer for your art / I'll try anything thrice / ... / my unsmiling proxy sends their regards"
"ill have a bittersweet paradox / if that's what you're having"
"i thought it was a poem / but i just wanted a grave from my tiny guilt"
"you mean more to me than creative sadness"
"may i liaison between your state of underdress?"
"finally, ill draw the line between epigraph and epitaph"
"i take a drag from the margins you leave blank"
"i am beside myself with artful feeling / may i be excused from the revolution before rush hour?"
"so you don't love me anymore, etc. / rest assured, this matter is not being taken lightly."
"that collarbone is a cautionary tale"
"we swerve into the overgrown garden / your wildest assumptions get the better of me"
"the synonyms misbehaved like bad habits"
"i waited for you to come back / it was an exercise of hostility"
"ill use forgiveness as an excuse to see you again
"let me overexplain a clear conscience."
pp. 70-71
"i plifer delusions by stanza"
July 30, 2022
I did enjoy reading this collection, but I do think it's not as strong as her other works. Still, Ms. Chingbee has a way with prose that always want you to continue turning the page. That being said, l did sort of feel that this reading would be enhanced more if you were already familiar with her previous works or if you were already invested in the local literary scene and the things that happen in it.
This isn't the book l would recommend to a new Chingbee reader, but that doesn't mean it's a bad collection—it definitely still has a lot of witty, compelling, and sharp lines that deserve to be read.
This isn't the book l would recommend to a new Chingbee reader, but that doesn't mean it's a bad collection—it definitely still has a lot of witty, compelling, and sharp lines that deserve to be read.
March 31, 2022
if i were a faulty AI made to compose a poem based on this book's algorithm it would go something like this:
"I view you below from my apartment window
The carousel spins without an apology
Perhaps when the paraselene lights another lamp
I will know where to go from here
Your advice is word best taken against colonization"
or something to this effect.
we know #ChingbeeCruz from experimental works that if not playing with form move gracefully around meanings by which subtlely is weaponized to cause or signify hurt. the poems in #Modus are no exception. on the surface they are deceptively simple. each one of the hundred + consist of five to seven lines, with no punctuations save the occasional exclamation or a loaded question.
the feel of these pieces may remind you of looking through your older sister's secret box of trinkets when she went out that one afternoon and you were a kid curious about the romantic delights of adulthood. you may find love letters, empty cologne bottles, souvenir keychains, etc. you can't tell for sure its backstory but you may very well assume.
vivid imagery and straightforward remarks to a proud, bearded 'You' fill most of the pages. the relationship between the two isn't quite cohesive. the structure is quite disorienting. the poems do not intend to express particular insights in the end. "I thought it was a poem/ but I just wanted a grave for my tiny guilt" she writes.
i think the texts are in some ways commentary on the frailty of poetry in itself. a lot of them appear as mere nice-sounding-phrase vomit. meaning the lines and language are pretty but made to be so disorderly. more than a distinct piece per page i figure it's better to read them per chunks as the table of contents suggested. not that that will help you identify more easily their thesis. instead of focusing on "what she's talking about" it's more advised to ask "how is she talking about it" here.
personally not my fave Chingbee book but that's just me. i like my poems easy.
"I view you below from my apartment window
The carousel spins without an apology
Perhaps when the paraselene lights another lamp
I will know where to go from here
Your advice is word best taken against colonization"
or something to this effect.
we know #ChingbeeCruz from experimental works that if not playing with form move gracefully around meanings by which subtlely is weaponized to cause or signify hurt. the poems in #Modus are no exception. on the surface they are deceptively simple. each one of the hundred + consist of five to seven lines, with no punctuations save the occasional exclamation or a loaded question.
the feel of these pieces may remind you of looking through your older sister's secret box of trinkets when she went out that one afternoon and you were a kid curious about the romantic delights of adulthood. you may find love letters, empty cologne bottles, souvenir keychains, etc. you can't tell for sure its backstory but you may very well assume.
vivid imagery and straightforward remarks to a proud, bearded 'You' fill most of the pages. the relationship between the two isn't quite cohesive. the structure is quite disorienting. the poems do not intend to express particular insights in the end. "I thought it was a poem/ but I just wanted a grave for my tiny guilt" she writes.
i think the texts are in some ways commentary on the frailty of poetry in itself. a lot of them appear as mere nice-sounding-phrase vomit. meaning the lines and language are pretty but made to be so disorderly. more than a distinct piece per page i figure it's better to read them per chunks as the table of contents suggested. not that that will help you identify more easily their thesis. instead of focusing on "what she's talking about" it's more advised to ask "how is she talking about it" here.
personally not my fave Chingbee book but that's just me. i like my poems easy.
December 31, 2025
A whole vibe. I especially liked "Siesta."
3.8/5
3.8/5
January 5, 2024
I’ve read the zines on which some of the poems here appeared, so before diving into this fairly thick book I was already fully aware that this is Conchitina Cruz’s most unserious work to date. It’s a 173-page escape from the somber dictations of love that influenced her works. That’s not to say she’s no longer waxing poetic about love here. She still does, but she does so lightly. This collection is saturated with mockery and humor, with several allusions and a whole lot of personifications so as to prevent making the poems feel like viral one-liners by an edgy young adult on X (which is frequently and justifiably deadnamed as Twitter after a billionaire manchild one day decided to replace it with a name akin to seedy porn sites). Each section shares the same format of one-sentence lines that are cut almost always without punctuations and are almost always disconnected from each other. Perhaps that is my main gripe about this book: there isn’t much variety in style, as if it’s a lengthy extension of the last lyrical sequence of the book that preceded this.
November 13, 2022
This is my second Chingbee book and I really admire the structure she used for the poems. It consists of 12 poems divided into stanzas written per page with each of the stanzas possibly be interpreted as a single poem away from the actual poem it’s in, which may lead the readers to think that there’s absence in coherence with each poem. Despite this, Chingbee wrote lines that are indeniably sharp and witty, that only Chingbee can write. It didn’t veer away from being enjoyable to read and be listed as one of her remarkable works.
December 10, 2024
Ganda. Love the angst and sarcasm.
This one is my personal fave:
Is it too much to ask?
You are always making up for things with kisses
I believe I am authorized to don a neutral expression
You give me too much credit
I could serve a head on a platter
But mostly I am merciless from afar
This one is my personal fave:
Is it too much to ask?
You are always making up for things with kisses
I believe I am authorized to don a neutral expression
You give me too much credit
I could serve a head on a platter
But mostly I am merciless from afar
May 17, 2022
"i thought it was a poem but i just wanted a grave for my tiny guilt"
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews