A Geography of (Un)Natural Hazards

Rina Garcia Chua

ISBN: 978-1-965439-12-8
Cover Art: Karen Zalamea
Book Design: Maria Bolaños & Keana Aguila Labra
Paper | 8.5 x 9 | 100 Pages
Publication Date: forthcoming 2026
Distributors: forthcoming Bookshop, Amazon, Barnes & Noble
Price: $20

Synopsis

From swimming in raging floods, breathing in wildfire smoke, parenting despite distances, narrating in languages carried across oceans, this debut poetry collection imagines a country that resists the bordering of maps. A Geography of (Un)Natural Hazards by Rina Garcia Chua dissolves the line that divides nations and offers instead a terrain shaped by stories of arrivals and survivals:

“there is a taste that lingers; a tongue that retrieves
there is a dream that hosts the Pacific’s horizon; an answer
there is an end to be pursued; another home to be made.”

Drawing on the debris of the archives, social media, and lived experiences, these insurgent poems centre migrant and liminal cultures not as footnotes but as architects of new environments, asking the reader to reconsider where they stand and daring them to listen to the silences that simmer beneath their feet. 

Advance Praise

“Language as witness, body as witness, skin as witness: embodied, fragmented, reassembled, evoked, made manifest on the page. Rina Garcia Chua’s work is a powerful testament to moments of suffering and of joy, against all odds. Her poetry sees those of us on the outside, at the margins, and with exquisite precision, using the line of poetry and the visuals of art, crafts a literary space, where we are seen and heard. Curating the personal with the political, resonating with what community means for the peoples’ of the world. This book redefines environmental ecology as a shared pact.”

—Renée Sarojini Saklikar, author of The Heart of this Journey Bears All Patterns series

“Rina Garcia Chua traces the burning and flooded terrains of our contemporary climate catastrophes. Her poetic vision enables us to grasp the pain of familial separation and loss, even as the air we breathe and the waters that rise show us that we are all transnationally entwined. Through her luminous verse, the fires, floods, typhoons and oceans speak to us, telling us how our bodies are already always in their thrall. As she makes the words dance, fade, shrink, expand on the page, she helps us navigate the bewildering intimacies of our times.”

—Joanne Leow, author of Seas Move Away and Exhumations: Inside the Body of a Petrostate

“Rina Garcia Chua’s poems are visual-textual layerings that perform on the page the intertextual interstices where colonial, racial, sexist double-speak is contravened and countermanded, where multilinguality is asserted and naturalized, where the politics of freedom and social justice are displayed, not displaced by dominant social discourses, and where migrant and immigrant voices mark their presence and protest, and impress upon their reimagined lands and redrawn maps their sense of being who they are: ‘Ganoon, malaya.’”

—Marjorie Evasco, author of It Is Time to Come Home, recipient of the S.E.A. Write award