Books
[ID: The book cover of MT Vallarta’s What You Refuse to Remember is navy with pink text. A hand with pink nail polish holds a pink heart pierced with a bleeding golden arrow. The heart is on fire. White stars twinkle in the background.]
What You Refuse to Remember
Winner of the 2022 Small Harbor Publishing Laureate Prize
“The poems in What You Refuse to Remember dare us to enter a fragmented, razor-sharp world of reckoning. From memories of the childhood friend who self-harms to the navigation of queer, Filipinix identity, to the surreality of losing a loved one to suicide, Vallarta asks us to consider the question: ‘what blisters but does not burn?’ The poems in this collection yearn not for deliverance from suffering, but instead ‘dream . . . of turning into a broom.’ With maturity and urgency, Vallarta sweeps broken glass and pale flowers up into a bouquet and delivers it to us with both hands. What You Refuse to Remember will lead you to the spot where ‘the shadows make a tent over your head.’ This collection demands that we lean into those shadows and seek shelter beneath their radiant revelations.”
—Joan Kwon Glass, author of Night Swim
“What You Refuse to Remember transgresses narratives of second-generation immigrant g[x]rlhood by intimately positioning it against cultural histories of imperialism, gender violence and femme subjugation. Its language cleaves through these dense entanglements with an unwavering queer, emo-feminist Filipinx voice-knife, exposing the raw, tender linkages. In its depth, we are ‘met in the moment of apocalypse,’ where ‘lips dangle fire.’ MT Vallarta responds, ‘the Filipino diaspora is a transpacific current of chronic sickness.’ Vallarta lays bare stories of surviving mental illness and su!c!d!al!ty, like how ‘light gushes into petals.’ All are gifted life-giving names—’sunflower,’ ‘apple peel,’ ‘dandelion.’ Here, queerness and florals are a carefully constructed life-raft, strong enough to hold and to ‘love in vice grips until we writhe.’”
—Angela Peñaredondo, author of nature felt but never apprehended
[ID: The book cover of MT Vallarta’s The Science of Flowers is a photograph of nine test tubes on a black shelf. The last three tubes contain yellow and purple flowers.]
The Science of Flowers
The Science of Flowers (Blanket Sea) by MT Vallarta explores themes of mental health, intergenerational trauma, queerness, and colonialism. A hybrid manuscript, The Science of Flowers melds poetics with truth and confession, demonstrating how creative nonfiction is a mellifluous genre that allows true stories to be told, but as slant as possible.
“What do you get when you combine goth-emo-punk nerve with the devastating sensuality of flowers? The Science of Flowers is the embodiment of this complex traversal through the fine line between life and death, freedom and empire, suffering and wellness, beauty and rupture. It is a collection that is loud with pain. Yet, like a persistent flower, it pushes against the dirt in search of new life, one that compels a necessary mourning before we can even speak of liberation. ‘What are the other ways we can bend and stretch our limbs, the other ways we can mark the gold and brown mapping our skin…’ It is not a question but a way forward written into flesh.”
—Muriel Leung, author of Imagine Us, The Swarm
This microchapbook is part of Blanket Sea Press’ 2021 Awareness & Advocacy series. A portion of Blanket Sea’s proceeds will be donated to the Institute for the Development of Human Arts, an organization working to advance anti-oppressive and transformative mental health practices.