What You Refuse to Remember

In this haunting collection, MT Vallarta unflinchingly weaves the reader through the slippery terrain of trauma and memory. The poems walk through the multiple dimensions of grief, survival, and hope. U.S. (neo)colonialism of the Philippines, growing up in an immigrant family, losing loved ones to suicide, coming to terms with queer identity—What You Refuse to Remember demonstrates how these journeys and monumental acts of becoming are intricately connected and how a painful past propels us to imagine and materialize brighter and more fruitful futures.