Loose Tongue: Poems 2001-2013 by Carlomar Arcangel Daoana

Loose Tongue gathers poems from twelve years of Carlomar Arcangel Daoana’s lyric engagements outside of his three previous poetry books, including a handful of works that haven’t been collected since their initial release in literary publications.

Of all the young poets finding their mature voice in the current decade, Carlomar Arcangel Daoana is the emerging adept at irony and elegant insouciance. In one breath, he can enunciate that “Armageddon may be happening in a house near yours / In which a father slams the door shut against listening neighbors” then in the next acknowlege that “. . . no door / Is spared from / A visitation of sorrow.” These rhythms of poetic respiration compel us to partake, poem after poem, in a consciousness constantly “soaking the world in [its] permeable human skin.”
—Marne Kilates

Loose Tongue: Poems: 2001-2013 continues the lyrical passage of the incomparable Carlomar Arcangel Daoana. In this fourth collection, the poetic imagination stays curious, honest, and strong-willed. Like the stone-charmer Orpheus, the poet sings and entrances us with beauty in an insect, the appalling timelessness of a loveless relationship, the fragility of mutual attraction inside a museum, or the sorrow over a tree that refuses to die. The unusual turn of his verses amazes us, perhaps even delights us, with the plausibility of the reality the poems seek to arrest, such things as “paper-flat blue of dusk,” “throwing words into the sea with the weight / of the littlest pebbles,” or “The birds . . . [r]earranging the weather into ceaseless rain.” The clever poet remains unseen. The fingers that strum the lyre silence the unwanted strings. The voice intones, as if shrouded in a mist. When at last the music fades to stillness, all we are aware of is the nakedness of our being, arrayed in a ghost of gentleness and truth, as his Ars Poetica divines.
—Shirley O. Lua

In this new collection, Carlomar Arcangel Daoana intones the world, both with the ease with which youthful lyricism professes knowledge of it and with the philosophical heft that acknowledges its limits. The poems are brazen in their admission of breakage, suppliant in their appraisal of the damage. This book is the incontrovertible proof that faith springs from every worlding’s keen sense of the end. The range of experience that receives the beautiful pain these pronouncements thoughtfully exhibit can only belong to a poet, whose vision of our earthbound reality sustains its inevitability but generously offers an alternative that forgives, and delivers us, from our smallness.
—Allan Pastrana