Letters to a Young Brown Girl

Barbara Jane Reyes was born in Manila, Philippines, and was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the author of five previous collections of poetry: Gravities of Center (Arkipelago Books, 2003), Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish Press, 2006), which received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets, Diwata (BOA, 2010), which received the Global Filipino Literary Award for Poetry, To Love as Aswang (PAWA, Inc. Publications, 2015), Invocation to Daughters (City Lights, 2017), and Letters to a Young Brown Girl (BOA, 2020). She is an adjunct professor at University of San Francisco’s Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program. She lives with her husband, poet Oscar Bermeo, in Oakland, CA.

“Barbara Jane Reyes’s Letters to a Young Brown Girl interprets the song of the broken with a ghostly call and response. There are life-saving questions here that Reyes’s poetry just might have the answers for. The who, the what, the where, and the why breakdown for the brown girl in all of us, uttered through an ancient voice, fragmented autobiography, and a mix-taped, multi-tracked lens. Reyes shows us how to dissolve and reassemble in the presence of our elders; how beauty is scalped and tainted for the sake of our mirrors; how best to arm ourselves. Letters are Reyes’ most potent weapons against imperialism, commoditization, and being single-storied. Make no mistake: this is Barbara Jane Reyes’s duende like you’ve never heard (or read) before.”—Willie Perdomo, author of The Crazy Bunch and The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon“Barbara Jane Reyes’s sixth collection of poems is fire—in the colloquial and primordial sense—life-giving, path-lighting. This is a book I know I needed as a young brown girl; it’s a book I didn’t know I needed, still. Reyes’s collection is a gathering place, a site of survival. Part interrogation, part epistle and chronicle, part soundtrack and roadmap, Letters to a Young Brown Girl weaves together songs of experience and wisdom, songs of kapwa and loób, connecting the voices of a lineage of power—from Sugar Pie De Santo to Ruby Ibarra—to create a resounding, multitudinous chorus of young brown women transforming shame into dignity. This book makes me want to throw on my pambahay, raise my glass, and sing!”—Michelle Peñaloza, author of Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire“In Letters to a Young Brown Girl, Barbara Jane Reyes is the articulation of rage, power and radical self-love—creating and demanding a space for justice and the value of one’s body, one’s stories, and one’s joy. ‘They say the earth’s most unruly parts sing like you,’ Reyes writes, remembering ancestors’ songs and lovesongs and whalesongs, claiming tongue and narrative ‘no matter what the territory or terrain.’ I have needed these poems my entire poet’s life—these poems that speak to ‘how a brown girl writes and lives,’ that respond with profound love to the urgent plea: ‘how aren’t you afraid, sister … please teach me how to be steel like you.’”—ire’ne lara silva, author of Blood Sugar Canto and Cuicacalli/House of Song“Barbara Jane Reyes’s latest collection centers the Pinay voice as resolute, as within a place of its belonging, and it is a voice that refuses to let go. It refuses to allow others to control the narrative: ‘Yeah, I’m pretty animal, I’m beastly. Are you threatened that this dark monster can holler and drown you out.’ There is nothing gentle about the disturbance Barbara creates in Letters to a Young Brown Girl. It is meant to be as unrelenting as the power structures it works against. Yeah it’s pissed, yeah it says f*ck more than a few times—this book asks for more than anger; it requires movement. It is meant to shake, to shudder, to transform.”—Jason Bayani, author of Amulet and Locus