Reverse Requiem
Alice James Books, April 2026
cover art by Natu Xantino
“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.”
—Cathy Linh Che, author of Becoming Ghost, Split, and An Asian American A to Z: A Children’s Guide to Our History
“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.”
—Tyree Daye, author of a little bump in the earth, Cardinal, and River Hymns
“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.’”
—Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities
“In their second full-length collection, Whiting Award–winner Cariño bends time. Challenging the theory that entropy can only increase, these poems pull ancestors and ghosts known and hidden to the fore, evoking a shared timeline that bends in many directions ... A slim collection that feels much heftier than its page count, this is a luminous work.”
—Sara Verstynen, ALA Booklist
“The invocation of elders, ancestors and ‘spirit companions willing me home’ provides a through-line for this reversal of the requiem that does not lay the dead to rest in silence but instead communes with and embodies these voices.”
—Veronica Corpuz, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette