Saturday Review: “Sugar Burns Bitter” a review by Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams in NCLR Online Spring 2024 of Ina Cariño’s collection Feast (2023)
Ina Cariño’s Feast looks back and cannot stop looking till it has gleaned some new truth or some new frustration, and then it continues on. Abrams muses, “The work here aches and swells with the memory of home and family, throbs with the discovery of self, reaches for the sharpest edges of reckoning, flinches, and heals.”
Cariño also infuses the linguistics inherent in representing the Philippines into her poetry. As Abrams puts it, “Throughout the volume, Cariño moves fluidly from English to the languages of the Philippines and back again. Since islands often compass what Gloria Anzaldua once termed “living language,” the shifts, which are not italicized, read at once as a true evocation of place and as a quiet refutation of Western exceptionalism.”
Abrams’ focuses last on Cariño’s fascination with taste, as she writes, “. . .in a theme that reprises and refracts throughout the book, we encounter the flavors that are hardest to swallow only to find that they can travel from an initial abdication of experience to the craving of experience – and further still, to the craving of being experienced.”
Read the entire review in the Spring 2024 issue out now! And order the book from Bookshop.org.
