About the book:
Juggernaut is not for the faint-hearted. Its poems careen from surgical to surreal, attend to the comical and criminal, and dispense an unflinching diagnosis of all that ails the self, the familial, the familiar, and the nation during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. In one of this massive collection’s early poems, the persona rues that “life is all fright / and laughter shrouded / in colors”—not quite the consolation we crave, but an argument against despair nonetheless, one that invites us to look more closely at the strange, artless beauty that limns our fragile existence. A formidable first book.
—Christine V. Lao
“What more needs to die/before the madness would vanish?” Alyza Taguilaso asks, and she herself responds, balancing on that thread between poetic disinterestedness and empathy, her epic vision on full display even as she speaks with a voice firm in its postcolonial anchorage. The “witchcraft swimming in (her veins)” is neither baggage nor crutch, not weapon, but compass, guiding us towards that “home at the end of all things.” Juggernaut is a sacred offering to the many shrines of our human persistence, and we are all blessed in return.
—Mikael de Lara Co