The Experiment of the Tropics: Poems (Paperback or Softback)

**Finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards**

Longlisted for The Believer Book Awards, 2020!

Named 1 of 6 must-read poetry books in April 2019 by The Millions.

The co-winner of the inaugural Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize.

Through the lens of history and photography, The Experiment of the Tropics returns to early-twentieth-century Philippines during American colonialism and asks, “How does one look at the past?”

By braiding the music of anthropology with the intimacy of the lyric, Lawrence Ypil explores history’s archives and excavates a city, both real and imagined, that is constituted by the shimmer of petal and porch, coral and brass—a river-refrigerator where women catch their reflections on the sheen of magazines and men lean against the walls of old houses and beckon, come here. So, we approach.

Spare, musical, and erotic, The Experiment of the Tropics is a meditation on the nature of a city and its longing, the revelatory power of photography, and the startling capacity of poetry to cut into the violent but redemptive parts of history.

Lawrence Lacambra Ypil is a poet and essayist from Cebu, Philippines and recipient of the prestigious Ani ng Dangal award in 2019. He has received an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa and an MFA in poetry from Washington University in St Louis on a Fulbright Scholarship. His first book of poems, The Highest Hiding Place (2009) was given the Madrigal Gonzalez Best First Book Award, and his work has received numerous awards including The Academy of American Poets Prize, the Philippines Free Press Awards, and the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards. His work explores the intersection of text and image, poetry and prose, and the role of material culture in the construction of cultural memory and identity. He teaches creative writing at Yale-NUS College in Singapore.