THE EXPERIMENT OF THE TROPICS: POEMS
by Lawrence Lacambra Ypil
978-0-9828142-5-3
$16.00 / Paperback / 6" x 9" / 64 pages
Gaudy Boy, April 6, 2019
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Distributed by Asterism & Ingram

Co-winner of 1st Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize, selected by Wong May
Finalist for Lambda Literary Awards
Longlisted for The Believer Book Awards
The Millions: 1 of 6 must-read books.

About

Returning to early-twentieth-century Philippine photographs during the time of American occupation, The Experiment of the Tropics asks, “How does one look at the past?”

By braiding the music of anthropology with the intimacy of the lyric, Lawrence Ypil explores history’s archives and excavates a city, both real and imagined, that is constituted by the shimmer of petal and porch, coral and brass—a river-refrigerator where women catch their reflections on the sheen of magazines and men lean against the walls of old houses and beckon, come here.  So, we approach.

The Experiment of the Tropics is a meditation on the nature of cities, the revelatory power of photography, and the startling capacity of poetry to cut into the violent but redemptive parts of history.

Lawrence Lacambra Ypil is a poet and essayist from Cebu, Philippines. He has received an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa and an MFA in poetry from Washington University in St Louis on a Fulbright Scholarship. His first book of poems, The Highest Hiding Place (2009), was given the Madrigal-Gonzalez Best First Book Award, and his work has received numerous awards including The Academy of American Poets Prize, the Philippines Free Press Awards, and the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards. He teaches creative writing at Yale-NUS College in Singapore.

Praise

“What is extraordinary is [Ypil’s] style . . . clean, plain, no-nonsense prose of a poet—the beauty of which makes it poetry. In whose hands, as in the company of Duras, Calvino, etc., one can see how poetry is indeed a tool of exploration towards mapping the world, a continual process of defining and modulation, always tentative. If language is the house of our being and poetry alone assuages our homesickness, the work being extremely terrestrial necessarily transcends the local, however heavily saturated with local colors. One lifts the pages of a family album with the poet, one falls under the spell.”
—Wong May, author of Picasso’s Tears

“Larry Ypil knows that poetry—like photographs, and like life itself—is a conjuring act. . . .  The poems in The Experiment of the Tropics magically capture what Freud, and Janet before him, once called the ‘subconscious’—that ever-fascinating layer of undying embers smoldering below the threshold of conscious awareness. . . . [These poems feature] the remarkable mind of an exceptional poet who has, against the backdrop of colonial history, brilliantly put into words those covert feelings that complicate our everyday desires and ‘disconcert the world.’”
—Mary Jo Bang, author of The Last Two Seconds

 “What seems far away in time comes closer in Ypil’s writing, and the past no longer seems past. The incremental music of his lines shares something with Philip Glass’s sonic weather. His poems build, twist, shift, and turn slowly but inexorably, pulling the reader forward. While the lines initially seem straightforward and descriptive, they become mysterious as Ypil weaves more and more information into his poems. ‘Four men did not equal four men unless the last one standing was laughing,’ he writes, bringing us to a resonant place that meshes together the documentary and the imaginary. By bringing together these divergent strands, Ypil is able to something more: he teases out what is erotic in the everyday.”
—John Yau, winner of the 2018 Jackson Poetry Prize

 “These poems are (as John Berger says of photographs) ‘quotations from appearances,’ fragmentary, discontinuous, ambiguous. With their surprising, capricious conceits, these ruminations on place, time, image, and memory bespeak a distinct intelligence and sensibility. Ypil is one of the finest poets from the Philippines today.”
—Resil B. Mojares, National Artist of the Philippines for Literature