ANX: Poems by Adrian Crisostomo Ho

ANX is a moving debut of darkness and loss transformed into figures of the visual, lyrical, philosophical. […] Ho shows us the discipline of dreaming: structure embodies restraint and advances clarity of language made magnificent by tangible images.
—Genevieve L. Asenjo

Adrian Ho’s first book of poetry explores how language approximates anxiety and loss, how stasis surrenders to movement and later on to transcendence. […] This is poetry that “more than teases—it invades your quiet” in a world where reprieve and release from suffering are rare, where only art and nature can console the restless and the lost.
—Ronald Baytan

Here is a book that speaks to the heart of the times. It is from someone who truly understands the grating tension inherent in living, in breathing, in having to surface from the morass of everyday. Anxiety was the poet’s enemy without recognizing it as such for a long time. He has lived through the years fighting the battle through interludes of stasis and mobility.
—Dinah Roma

In this debut collection, Adrian Ho ponders the twin capacity of verse to be sonorous and dissonant. The overarching theme or project, as it were, is what the very title suggests: anxiety, and what we need to do […] to transform and transmute it. The challenge can therefore be taken on myriad levels: the distilling of experience, the exploration/reinvention of the lyric, anxiety mirrored in the nuances of language.
—Joel M. Toledo