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waling waling palpitations
Paperback
Publisher Price: $25.00
ISBN13: 9781958600108
Publisher: First Matter Press
Published: Sep 15 2025
Pages: 176
Weight: 0.64
Height: 0.48 Width: 5.83 Depth: 8.27
Language: English
Waling waling palpitations is a genre-defying debut that pulses with queer lineage, decolonial reclamation, and lush, embodied ritual. Part drag spell, part orchid archive, this lying hybrid artifact blends poetry, photo-memory, ancestral invocation, erasure, and two decades of queer love letters into a prismatic offering. nawa angel a.h.-also known as Moonyeka-moves through performance, mythology, and intimate ephemera to reclaim matrilineal histories and diasporic queer desire with fearless, feral beauty. Waling waling palpitations refuses containment-blooming, mourning, and shimmering across form, language, and land. It is archive. Event score. Heart opening its many mouths.
If there has not been such a thing as quantum poetics before, Waling waling palpitations cracks open the space for it . . . These poems are multidimensional in the purest sense-multi-lingual, multimodal, multi-gender, multi-genre.
-Lisbeth White, author of American Sycamore
I left this work shaking with pleasure ... If Waling waling palpitations is an altered state, let me never return to the norm.
-Jen Soriano, author of Nervous & co-editor of Closer to Liberation
A kaleidoscopic, multisensory, and mesmerizing work...'i am what my mother hoped: something she could never know, ' the text sings of impossible possibility. I have perhaps never experienced a book that I wanted to absorb into my own being so much. A work of unmeasured beauty and genius. You will be fucking changed by this book. Seriously.
-Janice Lee, author of Separation Anxiety
nawa angel a.h. is a writer who defies cultivators. Like the orchid, Waling waling palpitations, is intertextual in its form and is a queer plant species that has learned to survive a cultivator's hands. The speaker tells the story of a closeted mother, an orchid who survived 'because she stifled herself from blooming, ' and the queer descendants she produced who unfurl in your hands. Call it epic poem, call it memoir, call it a colonial history, just know that as you read nawa angel a.h. is reading you too.
-Corinne Manning, author of We Had No Rules
Somewhere between performance, body, language, and image, there is an epic undulation that refuses to still. This book vibrated in my palms, recalling my body beyond reading. I always hope that books happen to me. This book blew open genre, gender, and biography, blooming like the waling-waling orchid into biomythology. An erotic song cycle. A full-throated juice-laden hip thrust back at colonization. A primal skin scream. You cannot contain what you hold in your hands.
-Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Reading the Waves & Chronology of Water
To make this work a specimen is to find it rejecting the pin, slithering from the page of its definition. Instead, engage as willing tribute, as response to the call, as witness and chorus, and find all your senses flung wide.
- Amber Flame, Author of apocrifa & Ordinary Cruelty
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