Will you tell me what I look like? by Raphael Atienza Coronel

The longing to be perceived courses through will you tell me what I look like: its aggressive eloquence suggests as much; and its protean tonalities; its performances—linguistic, typographic, artistic—of elaboration, interruption, and revision. But the great vulnerabilities—mental illness, amorous frustration, the various estrangements of urban existence, grief—that propel this longing persistently thwart its fulfillment too, the collection iterating the difficulty of apprehending not-yet- or never-fully-articulable states of being and being with and being without without diminishing them in the process. In the ways it surfaces and sabotages scrutable selves and their societies, Raphael Coronel’s shapeshifting poetry is ever-alert and startling, ambitious and moving.
— Mark Anthony Cayanan
The poems of Raphael Coronel are exercises of faith, professed again and again, in the capacity of art and its making to become a world in which to perceive the self and the world. Confined in a body undone by illness, in a hospital among other patients, in interiors shuttered by the pandemic, the poems, steadied by the belief that “I’m alive enough to write about dying,” anchor themselves to what has stood the test of time, as in the work of canonical masters, or what has overcome the threat of silence, as in the poet’s own work.  Art begets art and somewhere in between, a livable life emerges. —Conchitina Cruz
The success of any intertextual project resides in the artist’s ability to take a referent and transform it into what it signifies in his mind. However objective a painting seems, and however objectively it is depicted, the poet’s choice of details and instances inevitably reveal himself. Coronel’s gift lies in a kind of reverse-ekphrasis: it isn’t just about the work of art he’s writing about, it’s also about how one feels so compelled about the writing, one takes a look at the original material to see how faithfully it’s writing the poet.
—Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta