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Field Guide for Accidents

Poems

Part of National Poetry Series

Author Albert Abonado
Foreword by Mahogany L. Browne
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Paperback
$18.00 US
| $24.00 CAN
Beacon Press
On sale Oct 22, 2024 | 104 Pages | 9780807020517
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SELECTED BY MAHOGANY L. BROWNE FOR THE NATIONAL POETRY SERIES

An irreverent poetry collection that wrestles with questions of family, mortality, cultural history, and identity from the Filipinx-American experience

"you showed him your teeth, you dared him to look into your mouth to see the metal bands straightening your jaw into an American smile."—from Field Guide for Accidents

Born in the United States to Filipino immigrants, poet Albert Abonado is no stranger to the language of periphery. Neither wholly “American” nor Filipino, Field Guide for Accidents’s speakers are defined by what they are not: not white enough to be born in America, not Asian enough to feel at home in the Philippines. Abonado’s poetry illuminates the strange and surreal in domestic routine, suturing wounds of love, grief, and the contradiction of being Filipinx-American, two identities bound with a hyphen that resists negation. What results is a growing exposure to a world mired in paradox.

The poems in Field Guide for Accidents experiment with the constraints of the poetic line, shaping forms that exhume what tend to haunt us in the silence. In Field Guide for Accidents, memory becomes augmented with the imaginary; suspicion collides with superstition, while spirituality crosses paths with scientific fact. A mother returns to her son as a boat. A stew is prepared with blood yet masked as chocolate. The living eat with the dead in memories built like houses. Mythic, bloodthirsty creatures in Pinoy folklore prey on an exhausted poet. Research conducted in hindsight provides new avenues to explore regret.

For many third-culture kids of the Asian-American diaspora, there is no such thing as a success story for “fitting in.” What matters more is finding where you belong. Spooning images from hand to mouth, the poems in Field Guide for Accidents struggle with what it means to consume and be consumed by American culture.
“Albert Abonado’s poems open us up to feast and to wonder. This book asks: How do we grieve with the belly? How can we find nourishment from a cloud? Why don’t we laugh, really laugh out loud, more often—and isn’t that a form of prayer? And when can our exhausted parents rest, when can the immigrant worker fully rest, mouth open in dream, snores at full delicious blast? I feel so held by this book. Cradled, in fact. While, at the same time, challenged—to climb a tree, to dive into sea, to stop hiding my own hunger, my teeth. ‘Every good mouth knows when to be unhinged,’ one poem declares, and I want to live inside that declaration. Let this poetry unhinge your life.”
—Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

“Full of ghosts and prayers, Field Guide for Accidents is an exceptional book. Albert Abonado is a poet with the ability to maintain a clear and precise voice while navigating mysteries that are as vast as god and family and grief and America. The result is a collection of poems that are as insightful as they are emotionally expansive.”
—Matthew Olzmann, author of Constellation Route
Albert Abonado is the author of Jaw (Sundress Publications). He holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. His writing has appeared in the Boston Review, Colorado Review, Poetry Northwest, The Margins, Hobart, Waxwing, Triquarterly, and others. Albert currently teaches creative writing at SUNY Geneseo and the Rochester Institute for Technology. He is the former Director of Adult Programs at Writers & Books.
Albert Abonado View titles by Albert Abonado
Foreword by Mahogany L. Browne

I

From the Trees Full of Birdsong Comes Unripe Fruit
Mano
She Carries My Lola into the Bathroom
Ode to Kamayan
The God I Know Eats with Its Hands
The History of Prayer
How to Remove a Spike
To Prepare the Bitter Melon
Rival
For All of My Unborrowed and Unspent Joys

II

Punchline
Remedy
Witness
You Are Supposed to Cut a Mango into Squares
Outer Banks
Recollection
Instead of the Mastectomy
You Must Wait 15 Minutes Before You Try Again
An Honest Mistake

III

Field Guide for Accidents

IV

The Bears Never Talk About Winter
Flood Warning
Every Wilderness Is a Province of Teeth
A Colony of Ants Attack My Wrist and I Just Let Them
Wolf House
Landscape with Car Wreck and Father
The Trees Are Motherfuckers
Summer Solstice with Motownphilly as Soundtrack
Sympathy for the Conspiracy Theorist

V

About the Horses
Advice for Using Blood in a Poem
Poem as Manananggal Always Looks for the Moon
Poem as Aswang with Tasting Notes
Poem as Kapre Who Rolls Cigars Among the Pines
Poem as Aswang Who Passes Chickens from One Mouth to the Next
On the History of the Line
A Pile of Poems Is Called a Negation

Notes
Acknowledgments

About

SELECTED BY MAHOGANY L. BROWNE FOR THE NATIONAL POETRY SERIES

An irreverent poetry collection that wrestles with questions of family, mortality, cultural history, and identity from the Filipinx-American experience

"you showed him your teeth, you dared him to look into your mouth to see the metal bands straightening your jaw into an American smile."—from Field Guide for Accidents

Born in the United States to Filipino immigrants, poet Albert Abonado is no stranger to the language of periphery. Neither wholly “American” nor Filipino, Field Guide for Accidents’s speakers are defined by what they are not: not white enough to be born in America, not Asian enough to feel at home in the Philippines. Abonado’s poetry illuminates the strange and surreal in domestic routine, suturing wounds of love, grief, and the contradiction of being Filipinx-American, two identities bound with a hyphen that resists negation. What results is a growing exposure to a world mired in paradox.

The poems in Field Guide for Accidents experiment with the constraints of the poetic line, shaping forms that exhume what tend to haunt us in the silence. In Field Guide for Accidents, memory becomes augmented with the imaginary; suspicion collides with superstition, while spirituality crosses paths with scientific fact. A mother returns to her son as a boat. A stew is prepared with blood yet masked as chocolate. The living eat with the dead in memories built like houses. Mythic, bloodthirsty creatures in Pinoy folklore prey on an exhausted poet. Research conducted in hindsight provides new avenues to explore regret.

For many third-culture kids of the Asian-American diaspora, there is no such thing as a success story for “fitting in.” What matters more is finding where you belong. Spooning images from hand to mouth, the poems in Field Guide for Accidents struggle with what it means to consume and be consumed by American culture.

Reviews

“Albert Abonado’s poems open us up to feast and to wonder. This book asks: How do we grieve with the belly? How can we find nourishment from a cloud? Why don’t we laugh, really laugh out loud, more often—and isn’t that a form of prayer? And when can our exhausted parents rest, when can the immigrant worker fully rest, mouth open in dream, snores at full delicious blast? I feel so held by this book. Cradled, in fact. While, at the same time, challenged—to climb a tree, to dive into sea, to stop hiding my own hunger, my teeth. ‘Every good mouth knows when to be unhinged,’ one poem declares, and I want to live inside that declaration. Let this poetry unhinge your life.”
—Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

“Full of ghosts and prayers, Field Guide for Accidents is an exceptional book. Albert Abonado is a poet with the ability to maintain a clear and precise voice while navigating mysteries that are as vast as god and family and grief and America. The result is a collection of poems that are as insightful as they are emotionally expansive.”
—Matthew Olzmann, author of Constellation Route

Author

Albert Abonado is the author of Jaw (Sundress Publications). He holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. His writing has appeared in the Boston Review, Colorado Review, Poetry Northwest, The Margins, Hobart, Waxwing, Triquarterly, and others. Albert currently teaches creative writing at SUNY Geneseo and the Rochester Institute for Technology. He is the former Director of Adult Programs at Writers & Books.
Albert Abonado View titles by Albert Abonado

Table of Contents

Foreword by Mahogany L. Browne

I

From the Trees Full of Birdsong Comes Unripe Fruit
Mano
She Carries My Lola into the Bathroom
Ode to Kamayan
The God I Know Eats with Its Hands
The History of Prayer
How to Remove a Spike
To Prepare the Bitter Melon
Rival
For All of My Unborrowed and Unspent Joys

II

Punchline
Remedy
Witness
You Are Supposed to Cut a Mango into Squares
Outer Banks
Recollection
Instead of the Mastectomy
You Must Wait 15 Minutes Before You Try Again
An Honest Mistake

III

Field Guide for Accidents

IV

The Bears Never Talk About Winter
Flood Warning
Every Wilderness Is a Province of Teeth
A Colony of Ants Attack My Wrist and I Just Let Them
Wolf House
Landscape with Car Wreck and Father
The Trees Are Motherfuckers
Summer Solstice with Motownphilly as Soundtrack
Sympathy for the Conspiracy Theorist

V

About the Horses
Advice for Using Blood in a Poem
Poem as Manananggal Always Looks for the Moon
Poem as Aswang with Tasting Notes
Poem as Kapre Who Rolls Cigars Among the Pines
Poem as Aswang Who Passes Chickens from One Mouth to the Next
On the History of the Line
A Pile of Poems Is Called a Negation

Notes
Acknowledgments

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