Praise for Melismas:

“Poetry, in Marlon Hacla’s Melismas, abides by anticipations and arrivals. In these poems, a keen ear bears the vitality of voice, an ecstatic eloquence as song fortifies earth and alludes to grief unravelling. Hacla writes of audacious sentiment and a world wondrous that in these poems translate to an idiom that “returns [us] to the primeval nature of the ordinary.” This is a grammar of looking at the world that Kristine Ong Muslim’s translation aspires to cultivate, a vocabulary teeming with startling turns: systems that would keep us quiet, method to our extinction, machinery of wind, cellists and their exorcism. In this translation, we go through this cycle in anticipation of “the times [that] have been insinuating scores of uprising,” arousals that “grasp the temperament of things.” 

— Carlos Quijon, Jr., Art Historian & Curator

“What’s most distinguished in Marlon Hacla's Melismas is sincere invocation— “This is how I will carry on: lightning storm that enters a creek, dyed seraphim, bottled scorpion,” its indisputable inaugurations of pressure and freedom— “split the violins with an ax,” breaching form into form the riddled rhythms of our ageless Age of Noise, proletarian and industrial, domesticated and ferocious, are all “upright pickets” “worshipped by sound.” Kristine Ong Muslim, as acousmatic translator, is the essential technomancer of Hacla’s objets sonores. She stirs the “aching void” from which she’s able to “open the chest that holds the sabers” and transmit a corybantic resistance of language against its own exacting dictatorship. To this Treatise of Self-Subversions Unfolding in Time— “This is no longer me,” these “feathers of terror falling on my tabernacles” of perceiving where I perceive farther, stronger the “perspectives of enemies” alongside our relentless critique of reality, I offer solemn gratitude.”

—Marchiesal Bustamante, author of Mulligan (High Chair, 2016)

“So much of Melismas seems to insinuate itself between the recognizable despairs of the commonplace and its disconcerting, rapidly constituting outcomes, Hacla’s omnivorous consciousness troubling these two states, investigating and distorting where it is and what it’s turning into into the shapes of its own suspicions. The voice of the poem in the Filipino original, so expertly pitched just below histrionics, acquires, in Muslim’s translation, a lucidity that foregrounds its role as “the creator of engines that run [its] world”: there’s a private, arresting deliberateness behind the improvisational disorderings of imagery, the Ashberian way pronouns warp in and out of material antecedents. The distraught voice, relentlessly “eulogiz[ing] the futures,” escalates its suspicions into foreknowledge, successfully forestalling but also goading itself toward horror, and exerts a tyranny of imagination over the real that in provocative art, such as in this book, feels a lot like freedom.”  

—Mark Anthony Cayanan, author of Narcissus (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2011), Except you enthrall me (University of the Philippines Press, 2013), and Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous (Giramondo Publishing, forthcoming 2021)

“In Marlon Hacla’s Melismas, now finally existing in a bilingual edition, we can hear the chorus of agonized emotions. The book explores history, love for country, suppression, wounds that do not seem to recognize healing, and even the mystical aspects of our lives. In reading it, we are implicated in its sustained meditation where we can clearly make out the sound made by those that cannot be silenced despite the discordant hymns.”

—Nikka Osorio, author of Ang Nalalabi Rito (High Chair, 2012)

“Melismas conjures a hauntingly incommensurable universe with visceral grace through its startlingly ingenious and calculated syntax, in which signs and objects molt without end, fervidly negotiating their own light. Bodies are caught between radiance and conflagration, and snatches of an intimate topography haunts the reader, as though from a recurring dream, articulating the archaic registers of the visible world in the guise of a distant poblacion at once both chimeric and familiar. Ecstasy and danger, carnal knowledge and death, epiphany and destruction, hunger and tenderness, sound and light, weave together a marvelous incantation enacted through a long, fraught, and protracted apostrophe with the boldness and sincerity of a confessional, and whose singular yet prismatic voice trembles with the most feverish and illicit psalms. Unfurling and pacing forth with an almost scriptural weight, Marlon Hacla’s teeming invocation compounds the innermost and most private and diurnal minutiae with the ceremonial, the mystic, and the sacral, exquisitely notating upon what feels like an illuminated manuscript an archive of raptures and mirages, and the indescribable and ungraspable bestiary of secret faces and desires. Through Hacla’s searing verse, the reader becomes complicit to the nameless transgressions intimated in the text. The cantos manifest an operative logic akin to afterimage and delirium, and we partake of the intricate wonders and terrors in this Boschian orgy, vacillating between the phantasmic and the embodied, the particular and the sublime, dreaming and waking, the world of the living and the world of the dead, the sensible realm and the noumenon, all ears to a persona singing at the brink of knowing and annihilation.”

—Cristian Tablazon, artist and curator for Nomina Nuda

About the Author

Marlon Hacla is a programmer, writer, and photographer. His first book, May Mga Dumadaang Anghel sa Parang (Manila: National Commission for Culture and the Arts, 2010), was published as part of UBOD New Authors Series II. His second book, Glossolalia, was published by High Chair in 2013. He also released two chapbooks, Labing-anim na Liham ng Kataksilan (2014) and Melismas (2016). In 2017, he created the first robot poet in Filipino, Estela Vadal, as a Twitter bot with the Twitter handle @estelavadal. He lives in Quezon City, Philippines, with his cats.  

About the Translator

Kristine Ong Muslim is the author of nine books, including the fiction collections Age of Blight (Unnamed Press, 2016), Butterfly Dream (Snuggly Books, 2016), and The Drone Outside (Eibonvale Press, 2017), as well as the poetry collections Lifeboat (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2015), Meditations of a Beast (Cornerstone Press, 2016), and Black Arcadia (University of the Philippines Press, 2017). She is co-editor of two anthologies: the British Fantasy Award-winning People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction and Sigwa: Climate Fiction Anthology from the Philippines, an illustrated volume forthcoming from the Polytechnic University of the Philippines Press. Widely anthologized, her short stories have appeared in Conjunctions, Dazed Digital, Tin House, and World Literature Today. She grew up and continues to live in a rural town in southern Philippines.

About the Illustrator

Tilde Acuña teaches at the Department of Filipino and Philippine Literature – University of the Philippines, where he earned an M.A. in Philippine Studies (Philippine literature and art studies). His visuals appeared in Kritika Kultura, high chair, transit, UP Forum, Bulatlat, Pingkian, and others; his recent zines include Apo sa Ika-22 Siglo: Mga Abstrak (2017) and Klasiko Katalogo (2018), as well as creative and critical work in Humanities Diliman, Likhaan: The Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature, Lontar: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction, and Jacket2. Acuña’s research about Clodualdo Del Mundo’s postwar komiks adaptation of Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere is probably the first full-length study on the subject. A columnist for DavaoToday, he also contributed articles to three volumes of the Cultural Center of the Philippines Encyclopedia of Philippine Arts.