Web Del Sol presents Sarah Gambito as a Featured Poet for 2005 National Poetry Month.


The Poet Behind the Word


The Poetry Chapbook

Paloma Loves

Ethnicity is a Noodle King

Immigration

Paloma’s Light Journal, January 2nd

Paloma’s Light Journal: May 8th

Paloma and I Admire the Neon Lights

Paloma, Because I Love Her

Paloma’s Church in America

Blackberrying

The Ghosts Are Good Looking

 


 

"Early in Sarah Gambito’s book, we learn that 'You cannot be in two places at once.' In fact, the personality presented in these poems (they are personal poems; that is to say, they have their own unique and consistent personality) seems to have come from Elsewhere, on the way to Everywhere."
— Keith Waldrop

 

"The poems in Sarah Gambito's first book, Matadora, are sheer juxtapositions of anything--star fish, Tagalog, frisson-- and the friction very often adds a political dimension to the poetic. Lovely!"
—Kimiko Hahn

 

 

If you are meant to write,
don’t let anything stop you.
Go through a brick wall if you have to. But first of all, live a life that is here on earth. Be generous with yourself and with others. Drink wine.
Go to the movies.
Buy someone you love a necklace.


Paloma’s Light Journal: May 8th


Given the irascibility of watercolor—how it assumes the inexactitude of commodities like frustration and woman at window, it cannot be surprising that beneath every canvas there is a pond that is, in a word, swift.

There is a street in Tagaytay. Villagers lift their children on their shoulders. The children clap their hands. The sound of clapping echoes through the street in Tagaytay. Echoes through the porcelain cup she holds standing by the window.

If there is time for deliberation, then there will be time for epiphany. Grains of sand clattering on the floor. Fluttering movement—a hand reaching for a hot supper, a lucid wind chime. There is a black livingroom—figures in silhouette. What they do not say is written in a red book where a violinist simultaneously composes intermezzos made of grass, of cyclical action.

Going to the movies alone. Saying to the ticket-lady, “one please . . .” is a catharsis that is a gold leaf. Beating of the drum bleeds for the rarest time. It occurred to him that her braid was his only friendship. A man walking down a crowded street. He’s looking into headlights that close his eyes, prepare him for walking down a crowded street.


Sarah Gambito holds degrees from The University of Virginia (B.A.) and Brown University (M.F.A.). Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, The Antioch Review, The New Republic, Quarterly West, Fence and other journals. She lives in New York City.

Email Sarah Gambito: sgambito@juno.com

 

 


This vivid, incisive, feminist debut skewers Filipina American gender roles with its delightful sense of humor. With seriocomic tone, these elliptical lyrics reveal illusions and exclusions at the heart of America’s global narrative of economic “progress,” and the attendant loss of cultural identity and memory. At the same time,Matadora challenges traditional Filipina gender norms, beginning with the title which feminizes a word and profession traditionally masculine.

"....employs a cryptic, staccato style that implies much more than meets the eye.”
—Library Journal

 

"In Sarah Gambito’s first book, a world is reborn and so to accommodate it the speaker assumes just so many multiple elations, all of them daughters and sisters of the things of the world. These poems fly in from other countires. They blur the speed of prayers with alt.rock lyrics. In the poems continents reverse themselves as if drifting in amniotic fluid, lines of lineage re-emerge and voices in other languages adopt themselves to various new forms of speech. The speaker arrives from time to time. She is like snow. She takes short holidays. She smiles at birthday cards. She can eat anything that doesn’t criticize her. Some of her ex-lovers were not teenagers. She flits from Tagalog to East Villagese. She has a halogen stereo and waits for 'my late great Chachi.' She goes to clubs and raw bars and a street in Tagatay. She tries on her butterfly kite. Through all this, she is the breathless sum of her various accoutrements: crystal and sea-egg, a borealis, a lamp, a holidaypipe, a Paloma, a sister. A beautiful book."
—Tan Lin

 

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