Paolo Javier’s 60 Iv Bo(e)mbs is a polysemic pastiche that snatches speech fragments from a broad cultural spectrum spanning the US, Philippines and beyond. Its rollicking, shapeshifting vision seems to draw from a pre-conceptual space, resulting in what John Yau has called “an explosive brew of zany Americano, Tagalog, gobs of officialese, Hollywood pop melodrama, the Iliad and Virgil.”
Paolo Javier
Praise for 60 Iv Bo(e)mbs
Paolo Javier’s 60 lv Bo(e)mbs is one of the most radically detourned poetics that I’ve encountered in a long time. Rocking hard the perimeter of a national American literary metabolic center, Javier deftly develops what critical theorists have only been able to talk about: the birth of a non-idealist anticipatory-resilient para-national subject. His poetry engenders a polysemic motility that gives inner-life to this new state of independence. What does that mean? It means your kolonial momma’s got your poppa’s digits—by the products.
— Rodrigo Toscano
I am happy to think of Clark Coolidge when I read these brain-racing improvs, even though they are spun out on tropical and topical and political and polyvocal chords. These poems carry the youth of the world a whole step forward in all possible ways.
— Fanny Howe
Somewhere in the “trembling nautilus” shaped by Ed Dorn’s quick talking gunslinger, Ted Berrigan’s Manhattan, and Jose Garcia Villa’s “anchor,” Paolo Javier has mixed up an explosive brew of zany Americano, Tagalog, gobs of officialese, Hollywood pop melodrama, the Iliad and Virgil. I know of no other poet who can put Raquel Welch, P. Diddy, Il Duce, Miro, Murakami, and the Angry Oriental into his poems and write: “I’ll agree to venemous mass dual citizenship libations…” I applaud Javier’s brazen, in-your-face music doing “Dylan’s corpse and skull…”
— John Yau
Perma-war, reading Javier: “Big language not the way to see Paolo.” Grids “all gaping”—braille cayenne metastasizing in extremis, “cannily page unreal” distancing any autonomy, “auras persecuted” notching trouble “blink blink minutiae” “involuntarily colloquial.” If “English Is An Occupation,” let’s “cure the demure, bilangko”; enjoy temp “mass dual citizenship,” “forged community” moebius barcodes or “countermigration” muscegenation. “Aliases stand innuendo” to “access our own zombies.” “I lend you my voice for a tryst”—assuming an alter ego or to give the colonizers’ M.O. a comuppance. “I rode above allegory Tryteaser internment.” “Dumb down the noisy hatred unduly angst justice on the lam war foretells inferno.” “Mobile phone us!”
— Bruce Andrews
A powerful orchestration of linguistic and conceptual repetition propelling the text as a whole ensures that Javier’s long poem will fulfill the violent/tender thematic promise embodied in its title.
— Thomas Fink, Jacket
Paolo Javier’s… musings on topics running from history to racism, from Philippine culture to American culture, and from lust to love, share a panache and a radicalism that stimulates deregulated meaning and salutary disorder.
— Allen Gaborro, Galatea Resurrects