Patria Rivera

Patria Rivera was born and raised in the Philippines and now lives in Toronto, Ontario. In addition to four collections of poetry highlighted on this page, she co-authored Weathering: An Exchange of Poems, and published a chapbook: Sixth from the Sixth. Her poetry is featured in Oxford University Press’s Perspectives on Ideology (2009), and in Elana Wolff’s Implicate me: Short Essays on Reading Contemporary Poems (2010).
Rivera holds a journalism degree from the University of the Philippines. She has also undertaken media and editing studies at the International Training Institute in Sydney, Australia, the International Institute for Journalism in Berlin, Germany, and the Nieman Center for Journalism at Harvard University.

Poetry

Be

Winnipeg: Signature Editions, 2011.
PS8635 .I943 B4 2011

Publisher’s Synopsis

In a collage of disparate images, the BE poems spin together individual and collective states of feelings to examine the fragments of the human condition. Picture the man and woman wandering forlornly through an abandoned universe. Or the stupefied, brutalized, impoverished inhabitants in feudal backwater villages who appear to the outside world to suffer a quiet, gentle contentment and peace. Or how we all live by pushing rocks up slopes or by bottling the ashes of a once-dormant-now-live volcano for hawking to tourists as souvenirs.

Poetry

The Bride Anthology

Calgary, Alta: Frontenac House, 2007.

Publisher’s Synopsis (from its website)

The ways of love are long and torturous. They include the ability to start over after things have blown up as well as the fine art of remembering the good times and forgetting the bad. Sometimes we need an old, never-married aunt to bring us back to an understanding of where true love resides. Or a Catullus who keeps on redefining what the ideal love relationship is. Or someone who has loved too fast and too furiously. The convoluted paths of love never fail to beguile. Catch this poet as she runs after the fickleness of love and longing.

Poetry

Puti/White

Calgary, Alta.: Frontenac House, 2005.
PS8635 .I943 P88 2005

(Series: Quartet 2005)

Publisher’s Synopsis (from its website)

Puti/White explores the past in places buried under layers of shifting reality. Here a poet searches for her lost roots – partly remembered, partly imagined – where language questions the everyday and probes the persistent difficulties of preserving the personal from the pull of the public world. These poems seek to capture the voices that lie within, those engagements of the particular with the universal that spark moments of grace.

Awards and Honours

2005 Eric Hill Award of Poetic Excellence (2nd prize winner)
2006 Trillium Book Award–English poetry (Shortlisted)
2007 Global Filipino Literary Award for Poetry (Co-winner with Igloria, Luisa. Trill & Mordent.

Poetry

The Time Between

Winnipeg: Signature Editions, 2018.
PS8635 .I943 T56 2018

Publisher’s Synopsis (from its website)

The Time Between is a series of conversations with a contemplative heft, only in this case infected and inflected by operation-manual speech and military-industrial-complex mores and malaise—as if the other had been forced to contemplate violence in a real way, had been forced out into the crowded world, forced to let in multiple and troubled points of view.

The “I” in this book moves from person to person and from person to place, following an urge to shape the chaos of life into language that is sometimes undecipherable, sometimes ludic or comic. Layers and mixed states mine the depths of modern anguish and disbelief. But there is joy in the spirit of these poems, even when it’s scant and spare; even when it’s living off scraps of love, solace and exaltation; even when it’s yearning to let the mind or the heart go uncaged, if only for a transitory moment.