The Brooklyn Rail

APR 2019

All Issues
APR 2019 Issue
Critics Page

Entries

12-1-14

RHETORICAL POSITIONING OF YOURSELF
what kind of writer are you?
Maxe told me: you love language for the same reason you love people


12-21-14

winter solstice      → but what if I ask with resentment?


2-5-15

YOU MAKE A DECISION

- TO BE A POET
- TO BE SOFT
- TO BE COMPASSIONATE
- TO BE IN LOVE
- TO FACE THE HURT
- TO OPEN UP YOUR BACK
- TO GROW


3-17-15

—inundation might be good


7-12-16

All this junk in my head. What’s a clear thought?


5-30-17

/ I’m just trying to get to the next page
/ “Affective turn”
/ A book called Depression: A Public Feeling
/ Ask me again where I feel it most in my body
/ Rage
/ My kindness looks garbled. I feel like I’ve aged so much in such a short amount of time.


6-10-17

Maybe I should start a depression journal. LOL. What would that look like? I was just thinking how I haven’t had the desire to write here. And I think—if in the journals I’m really just talking to myself—then I must not like talking to myself much? Maybe certain parts. The ones where this “I”—the one writing—feels frustrated and isolated. Well here I am writing anyway.


8-18-17

a language for trauma—to say it plain and then to evaporate into rhythm—is it bodiless—not the words themselves but the voice


8-21-17

eclipse day
a person gave me her pair of solar glasses when I asked just to borrow for a glimpse –
the sun is very orange seen through them


10-23-17

what is poetry community?
where / how is it fucked?
how to change?


1-23-18

Feeling a language foreign as I have been foreign to myself. As when I turned 30 and learned for the first time the Tagalog word for blue. Not azul or asul or even malungkot. It’s right there in the national anthem tinting the sky: BUGHAW.


3-11-18

How do I listen without waiting for an answer?


3-20-18

relationship with stuff that is “not” poetry


7-6-18

oh geez waiting anxiously for Joël at a very white restaurant that I had assumed would be more like a café


7-14-18

someone saying in a dream: “I can only fall when you’re there”


7-29-18

“writing took place that was incredibly violent”
                  → Camilo describing the colonial violence of white settlers seeing and surveying the movements of indigenous people


10-6-18

Me saying we don’t come out of relationships/situations/dynamics unscathed

M responding: we don’t enter relationships unscathed either

Contributor

Aldrin Valdez

Aldrin Valdez is a Pinoy writer and visual artist. They grew up in Manila and Long Island and currently live in Brooklyn. Aldrin has been awarded fellowships from Queer/Art/Mentorship and Poets House. Their poetry & visual art appear in The Felt, Femmescapes, Nat BrutPoor Claudia, and The Recluse. Collaborating with writer & organizer Ted Kerr, Aldrin co-organized Foundational Sharing (2011-2015), a salon series of readings, performances, & visual art. Most recently, they’ve co-curated two seasons of the Segue Reading Series with fellow poet Joël Díaz.

close

The Brooklyn Rail

APR 2019

All Issues