Small Wars Manual

Chris Santiago’s debut collection Tula was selected by A. Van Jordan as the winner of the Lindquist & Vennum Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Copper Nickel, Conduit, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, and American Public Media's The Slowdown. His collaboration with composer Lembit Beecher and ethnographer Todd Lawrence, Say Home, was commissioned by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and received its world premiere in 2019. A Loft Poetry Mentor and Fellow of the McKnight Foundation, the Mellon Foundation/ACLS, and Kundiman, he received his PhD from the University of Southern California and recently joined the Faculty of the School of Critical Studies at CalArts in Santa Clarita, CA. He lives in Pasadena.

Praise for Small Wars Manual“Early in Small Wars Manual, Chris Santiago writes: ‘Dawn in a shit- / hole country.’ Then, toward the end: ‘My children / have never seen war. // It is also true / that they have never lived / without it.’ I’m getting goose bumps just typing it. Santiago hears the planetary majority’s endless aria, the one sung for centuries testifying their humanity to an impenitent martial minority. The way this book spins the mirror between what’s global and what’s domestic, and what’s history and what’s inside our bodies right now this second—it’s absolutely extraordinary, a dazzling ability I associate with only the very, very finest poets of any era. Small Wars Manual is a masterpiece, one of those books I read and know at once I’ll be coming back to the rest of my life.”—Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!“Chris Santiago poignantly combines text, visuals, and reverse erasures, along with sources past and present, to offer a thrilling and multifaceted assemblage of poems that confronts the casual and quotidian nature of warfare. From the Philippines to Vietnam and elsewhere, Santiago powerfully reconstructs the language and images found in a war training manual standardized by the United States government, and then out of that wreckage comes fragmented poems crafted with stunning precision. This collection delivers a brilliant reframing of the dark and vicious reality behind state-sponsored projects of war, along with the personal and collective losses endured by those who survive its outcomes.”—Mai Der Vang, author of Primordial“A beautifully wrought book about the relationship between language and war. The power in these poems lies within absence, silence, and the interstitial spaces between language. The power in these poems also lies within the often-flat tone of military diction and the diction of manuals. Despite the brutality of war and the language of war, these erasure poems ultimately point toward music: ‘Inland are cities of light / sprawling machines / that can traverse the past,’ Santiago says. ‘The engine / is made of singing.’”—Victoria Chang, author of Dear Memory“Occasionally—not often, but it happens—you read a book of poems in which you discover the present. As unsettling as a book like that can be—you had thought you were living in the present, after all—it is also a gift. Chris Santiago’s Small Wars Manual is one such gift. These poems redirect your attention to the world, and particularly the United States of America’s projection of force into it. That they do so both artfully and righteously is a further gift, not to be expected, but gratefully received. This is a book that, by guiding you to the present, changes the present.”—Shane McCrae, author of Pulling the Chariot of the Sun“Chris Santiago’s blistering Small Wars Manual takes its name from the seminal 1940 Marine Corps tactical guide on US counterinsurgency and occupation. The poet requisitions this how-to text and—with great intelligence and heart—obliterates, deconstructs, appropriates, and reassembles its language and structure to lay bare the sickness at the core of the American imperial project. This is a restless, incisive book that surveys histories of colonization and subjugation in erasures and epistles, diagrams and cycles, including an astonishing ekphrastic sequence on the photographs of An-My Lê. Small Wars Manual advances the literature of truth-telling and dissent in poems that insist ‘Even souls // have souls. / Even the enemy.”—Edgar Kunz, author of Fixer“An innovative poetic exploration of the oft-forgotten legacy of US militarism and colonialism in the Philippines. With deft craftsmanship, Santiago ‘salvages’ fragments from this history into poems of witness wrought from letters, words, and silences to offer an urgent instruction in compassion and a call to confront America’s stories of empire and resistance. As Santiago reminds us, ‘out of fragments one could learn,’ and in these poems, we are taught to see anew. This is a collection for readers who dare to imagine a different future by learning from and reengaging the past. Santiago’s work is not only an act of salvage, but also one of reclamation—a confrontation with the violence of empire, transformed into reckoning.”—Michelle Peñaloza, author of All the Words I Can Remember Are PoemsPraise for Tula“Chris Santiago’s poems encourage us to see English the way an immigrant does—as something different, to be broken and remade. Through this difference in language, Santiago makes readers aware of both the poet’s otherness and their own. This is a book that both transports us and transforms us.”—Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of A Man of Two Faces“Tula: a ‘ruined Toltec capital’ in Nahuatl, yet in Chileno, ‘slang for cock. Also nightshade, bellflower,’ and in English, ‘square-rigged for new continents.’ The mysteries of language, the vagaries of sound and syntax, the reverberations of alternate meanings as words flood the ear: these are the subject of Santiago’s gorgeous debut collection. ‘It was homegrown & inequitable’: this poet’s imagination, testing at every moment the relationship of his American present to his Filipino family’s past, creates a rich complex of memory and desire.”—Marjorie Perloff, author of Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy“‘Like it or not,’ writes Santiago, ‘the Dead keep coming.’ This haunted (and deeply haunting) collection makes us aware of the spectral legions who might otherwise be lost to historical feeling in our time. Interweaving personal reflections with diasporic etymologies, a fractured family history, and close ecological observation, Tula discloses the many ways that our nation’s incursions into the Pacific Rim region may contribute to the political unconscious of contemporary American poetry. Here, the immense magnitudes and buzzing minutiae of a world resonate together in ‘music the stars would make if they / were as small as they looked.’”—Srikanth Reddy, author of Underworld Lit“In Tula—the word for poem in Tagalog—Santiago pursues the language and experience of the immigrant, engaged with dreams, wonder, oppression, and heartbreak. Exquisitely lyric, fierce and delicate, the poems often are fractured in form and charged with suffering. Whether set in Manila, Japan, or Minnesota, these poems, lit with imagination, reveal what poetry can be in life.”—Patricia Kirkpatrick, author of Blood Moon“In a hypnotic blend of languages and lands, Tula captures the voice of a world we are happy to inhabit. The lines are taut and spare; the scope is both intimate and communal. What surprises me most is the ability to move seamlessly between the exterior world to the depths of the interiority of these speakers. It’s not so much that the language here is new as that the message is so urgently original. Reading these poems feels as if ‘a door opens & your name / is called & all at once you aren’t cut off anymore / from the rest of the world: you are / the rest of the world.’”—A. Van Jordan, author of When I Waked, I Cried To Dream Again