“Ina Cariño’s REVERSE REQUIEM addresses the ghosts of history, which through language and tender attention, Cariño exhumes and brings to aliveness with sumptuous naming. Working against silence and power and deeply imbued with liberatory politics, the poems are an ode to self, lineage, and love. This work is a triumph.”

“REVERSE REQUIEM at once claims space(s), body(ies), time(s), name(s), people(s), love(s), and food(s) and is unclaimed by them, making possible for what Linda Gregg writes in her essay ‘The Art of Finding,’ ‘the art of marrying the sacred to the world, the invisible to the human’ What we do not want to claim, but must, so that we can be unclaimed by its hold. Cariño claims forms, the truth of beauty, claims family, revolutionaries, and the moon to relinquish its authority over the poet. These baring and fearless poems are built upon the precision of a concise line, the lyric mind considering all the history(ies) enclosed around us.”

“Ina Cariño’s poems are at once soulful and urgently physical—made of questions and salt, of memory and a fingertip dancing across steam. Home in this book is both a longing and an entirely real place, full of mountains, jasmine, an artificial lake, an anti-imperial rage, true raucous celebration, raw piercing grief, and a ‘mother’s mothers.’ This collection asks, ‘how to embody / the song of being alive’ when so much conspires to kill the music, end the breath? This poetry answers in the most gorgeously strange ways, one of them being silence, a deep silence ‘that says yes, I remember this song.’”