All the Words I Can Remember Are Poems

All the Words I Can Remember Are Poems challenges colonised ideas of history and truth, particularly in relation to Filipinx/a/o history and its colonisation by the United States.

Engaging with archival materials and playing with the sounds of remembered words and their unique associations, Michelle Peñaloza confronts violent and ironic tensions within historical narratives. She subverts erasure and creates her own cultural fluency that speaks to growing up in diaspora and the complexities of identity, motherhood, and the transmission of love across generations.

The expression and reception of love between parent and child, particularly Filipinx/a mothers and daughters, becomes its own translation, a generational game of telephone across time and space.

In conversation with the history of US imperialism and the broader implications of colonisation, this book embraces the impotence of revision, the power of the always-reaching—what wisdom and connection we find there.