Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous by Mark Anthony Cayanan

About the book:
Palimpsests, discrete yet linked episodes, trivia and gossip amidst tensions and complexities of bourgeois daily life, halting meditations on the transcendent power of art and its terrors, all combine to give amplified utterance to Cayanan’s aptly titled Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous. This poetic “lengthy sigh” consists of many voices held in place by a deconstructed, reconstructed Aschenbach whose fears, doubts, and desires are visibly recognizable in present-day global concerns, not least on youth and beauty, sexuality, trauma, and disease. Amidst an excess of complementary voices, both direct and oblique, a self that is engaged yet disengaged from melodrama, folk belief, bullet-holed scenes of political violence “through which futures have escaped” bookends these poems seemingly. In dismantling poetic traditions but also in their retention and continuation, in a deft reliance on the associative, organic nature of thought and emotion, Cayanan offers artful testimony to the impermanence and always incomplete comprehensibility of contemporary life. / Isabela Banzon
As each time with their previous books, Mark Anthony Cayanan’s Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous is the poet at their most daring role: channeling Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach and staging the drag in Manila, among other settings, the poems rehearse here a critical engagement with the contemporary Philippine world and, in the same gesture, a disruption to the prevalent imaginary and practice of Philippine poetry. Inimitable and ironic, Cayanan performs the possibility that remains for the poetic at a time when even it has seemingly become vain and trite: “There’s no history / not worth plundering for poetry,” the poet writes, and so they go ahead and do it, showing us in startling turns other ways of knowing where we are and what we still could be. / Christian Jil Benitez
What else but beauty—idealized, convulsive—to rouse desire’s deranged calculus? Set in cities droning with “replicable grief,” with “recycled bliss,” in places where utterance seems viable only as an exercise in depersonalization, manifesting as self-contempt or caustic wit…. Yet despite their steadfast irony, the poems in Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous are always human in their frailty, “as final in” their “forms as seizures.” These are poems that affirm and revel in the vulgar, that put the body, whatever desiring body, however textual, at risk as it traverses its urges and drives. But that understand too that drives are plastic in their determinations, and never final, and so perhaps embolden; as the I in the collection’s epilogue “Ben Ben Ben Ben Ben” says, “though I’m afraid of living as myself I don’t want to be unafraid.” / Raymond de Borja