Invocation to Daughters: City Lights Spotlight No. 16 by Barbara Jane Reyes

Feminist experimental poetry in the tradition of Audre Lorde and Theresa Kyung Cha from a prominent Filipina American poet.
 
"Reyes writes with conviction about the various ways imperialism transforms women into 'capital, collateral, damaged soul.' However, the women that appear throughout the book are not merely victims; in Reyes's radical cosmology, these women—these daughters—are rebels, saints, revolutionaries, and torchbearers, 'sharp-tongued, willful.' This book is a call to arms against oppressive languages, systems, and traditions."—
 
Publishers Weekly, starred review
 
"Infused with Spanish and Tagalog, Reyes's beautiful, angry verse shines throughout. For a wide range of readers."—Library Journal, starred review
 
"I cannot shout 'brilliant' loud enough. Start to this finish, Invocation to Daughters is truth. 'I am not your ethnic spectacle. I am not your cultural poverty. You / don’t get to frame me.' This is a book you read and teach and live."—Anthony Cody, author of Borderland Apocrypha
 
Invocation to Daughters is a book of prayers, psalms, and odes for Filipina girls and women trying to survive and make sense of their own situations. Writing in an English inflected with Tagalog and Spanish, in meditations on the relationship between fathers and daughters and impassioned pleas on behalf of victims of brutality, Barbara Jane Reyes unleashes the colonized tongue in a lyrical feminist broadside written from a place of shared humanity.