All the Words I Can Remember Are Poems

All The Words I Can Remember Are Poems challenges colonized ideas of history and truth, particularly in relation to Filipinx/a/o history and its colonization by the United States. Engaging with archival materials and playing with the sounds of remembered words and their unique associations, Michelle Peñaloza confronts violent and ironic tensions within historical narratives, subverting erasure and creating her own cultural fluency that speaks to growing up in diaspora and the complexities of identity, motherhood, and the transmission of love across generations. The expression and reception of love between parent and child, particularly Filipinx/a mothers and daughters, becomes its own translation, a generational game of telephone across time and space. In conversation with the history of US imperialism and the broader implications of colonization, this book embraces the impotence of revision, the power of the always-reaching--what wisdom and connection we find there.

Author: Michelle Peñaloza
Publisher: Persea Books
Published: 09/16/2025
Pages: 96
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.50lbs
Size: 8.93h x 7.03w x 0.31d
ISBN: 9780892556274

About the Author
Peñaloza, Michelle: - Michelle Peñaloza is the author of All The Words I Can Remember Are Poems, winner of the 2024 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor's Choice Award from Persea Books and the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. She is also the author of Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire, winner of the 2018 Hillary Gravendyk National Poetry Prize and two chapbooks, landscape/heartbreak and Last Night I Dreamt of Volcanoes. Some of her honors include the Frederick Bock Prize from the Poetry Foundation and grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Community Foundation of Mendocino County, Upstate Creative Corps, 4Culture, Artist Trust, Literary Arts, and PAWA (Philippine American Writers and Artists). The proud daughter of Filipino immigrants, Michelle was born in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan, and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. She now lives in Covelo, California.