ABOUT THE BOOK

Firelight on Opal Veins is an experiment in visual poetry. In this collection, Jose Marte Abueg used horizontal line cuts, and played with how lines are divided and phrases separated but are kept visibly connected. The collection also includes the author’s previously published poems which have been re-formed with this focus on appearance.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jose Marte A. Abueg had no formal training in writing poetry except for an elective he took before graduating from the UP School of Economics.

His poetry collection Bird Lands, River Nights and Other Melancholies won the Gawad Likhaan: UP Centennial Literary Prize in Poetry in 2008. This was then published by the UP Press in 2009 under the same title, and was nominated for the 11th Madrigal-Gonzalez Best First Book Award and the National Book Awards.

He became a fellow at the 51st UP National Writers Workshop in 2012. In 2014, he won a Palanca Award for his poem, “Musikerong Bulag.” In the same year, his book Hidden Codex: Fictive Scriptures was published, which won the Philippine Literary Arts Council Prize for Best Book of Poetry in English at the 34th National Book Awards.