Winner of the 2022 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize
“Everything everywhere all at once, yet intimately, pulsatingly at home.” - Yeow Kai Chai, winner of the 2022 Singapore Literature Prize
A gathering of voices from nature, pop culture, and human corruption, this “crystalline” collection asks what it means to live in danger, and how to break free.
About
The archaeological traces of a snail trail are left on a window, evidence of a fevered, sleepless wandering. A charlatan fortune teller utters prophecies from a coffin of a box. Small moments—the cutting of a butternut squash, the discovery of an octopus in the water —become windows into the tragicomedy of human life.
A journey between politics and ecology, Waking Up to the Pattern Left by a Snail Overnight bursts open the shared doors of meditation and madness, of nature and human corruption, throwing the sounds and visions of Taylor Swift, Bjork, Maria Ressa, Mad Max, Japanese anime, and the Marcos dictatorship into an unpredictable dance filled with moments of silence and wonder.
Tinged with darkness but never with despair, these poems walk through remnants of grief, destruction, and corruption and toward versions of rebirth, each one a map showing us the way to heal from loss and answer with joy.
Author
Jim Pascual Agustin grew up in the Philippines during the Marcos dictatorship and moved to Cape Town, South Africa, in 1994. He writes in Filipino and English. He holds a degree in English Literature from Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines. He has been a lecturer, an NGO worker, a secondhand music shop employee, and a fridge cleaner kit seller, among others.
Agustin has published several books of poetry and a collection of stories since 1992. His poetry has been recognised at the New Coin DALRO Awards, the EU Sol Plaatje Poetry Awards, and the AVBOB Poetry Competition. Lunch Ticket, a US-based online journal, awarded him the Gabo Prize.
Praise
“In this late 21st century landscape swirling with the debris of recent and older histories, in a present constantly marked by the virus of time, we are all travelers, migrants, or refugees. In our search for what lets us know that neither the dead nor the living have abandoned us to our fate, we startle awake or alive at the smallest sign: a soft body waving a tentacle from out of rock, a snail circumnavigating the world reduced to a windowpane. In these thoughtful poems, Jim Pascual Agustin allows us to consider what else there might be besides shadow or sorrow, between those moments when we feel that what we carry is either heavy as sand or lighter than ash.”
—Luisa A. Igloria, 20th Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (Emerita); author of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts
“Jim Pascual Agustin’s Waking Up to the Pattern Left by a Snail Overnight is a stunning poetry collection. With his feet in pop culture and his head on a kind of political-ecological-spiritual plane, Agustin writes to the reader in a language that is equally intimate and on fire.”
—Mark Statman, author of Hechizo and Exile Home
“What presence, what exquisite sensitivity. Such perspicacity of mind and heart illuminates Jim Pascual Agustin’s crystalline poems. Masterfully observed, shone through with Zen penetration, these songs of innocence and experience divine a universe of complex lives lived, torn asunder, celebrated, and mended. You are enveloped in these entirely believable scenarios filled with people and creatures finding themselves in everyday moments, and extraordinary circumstances. With a few deft strokes, many of the poems here range far and delve inwards. Politics, nationality, identity, family, laws of nature – everything everywhere all at once, yet intimately, pulsatingly at home.”
—Yeow Kai Chai, author of One to the Dark Tower Comes
"The book's tone of calmness falls like a cashmere shawl about you as you sit reading this book of poems. That calmness makes more emphatic the occasional shard your eyes suddenly stumble across. . . . If the poems in [Agustin's] new book, Waking Up to the Pattern Left by a Snail Overnight, represent his newest or newer work, then I’m glad since they’re among the best poems I’ve read by him."
—Eileen Tabios, The Halo-Halo Review
"The experience of life as an effort to pull light from night is central to this poetry collection. . . . Lucid, ironic, and tender."
—Lúcia Leão, Rhino