The Second World Poems

Rafael Antonio C. San Diego’s first book of poems is truly remarkable. From poem to poem – or poem or prose, if you will – one is struck by their inimitable finesse. Here is an original, innovative, and sturdy voice in our own poetry’s heartland where the language forged from English is of our sweat and blood in our own scene and time.
–Gémino H. Abad

In The Second World, San Diego apprehends the imagined and ignites it with the simplest of fires, into the kind of poetry that “draws all our secrets/ under one cloud.” He reclaims utterance not by shunning the real, but by biting straight into its hidden pith: “I think I now know/ why I cannot understand/ everything,” San Diego writes, with a humility that is as effortless as it is powerful. And we are reminded, too, of the earnestness, the compassion, the gratefulness and awe necessary to make the mortal endure.
–Mikael de Lara Co

About the Author

Rafael Antonio C. San Diego is the son of a cowboy and a princess. He was born and raised in Manila, and graduated in 2005 from Ateneo de Manila University. He won 2nd Prize in the 2010 Don Carlos Palanca Memorial award for Poetry, and was a participant in the 51st UP National Writers’ workshop in 2012. He works in the Correspondence Office of the Office of President Benigno Aquino III. This is his first book.