ABOUT THE BOOK

The poetry in Flutter reckons with Metro Manila—crowded, loud, expensive, gridlocked—a primate city that distills political violence, social inequality, and environmental decay to every island in the republic. To exist in the city is to bear the national crisis at its most immediate.

Flutter traces the psychic cost of living under that pressure and asks: “How do you love a country that kills you?” The beauty of the Philippines is real, precarious, shadowed by the conditions that diminish it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Isabelita Orlina Reyes is a freelance editor and writer. She has written two books of poetry, Stories from the City and In Transitives. Together with Caroline S. Hau and Katrina Tuvera-Quimbo, she co-edited the anthologies Querida and Elite. She is also a retired professor of the Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of the Philippines Diliman.