David Maduli
ISBN: 978-1965439005
Book Design: Maria Bolaños
Paper | 7 x 7 inches | 86 Pages
Publication Date: October 22, 2024
Distributors: Bookshop, Amazon, Barnes & Noble
Price: $20
Synopsis
Alemany Bay Window / Redwood Coast Record Crate is David Maduli’s dual poetry collection rooted in the physical, cultural, and emotional geographies of a shifting San Francisco Bay Area. Side A tracks the textures and reflections of his family home in the Outer Mission District, a space of history and memory for multiple generations since the migration of ancestors from the Philippines. The B-side speaks through this DJ’s affinity for vinyl grooves, record sleeves, liner notes and samples to intone the musicality of living in and moving through the world. Segueing within and between both works, Maduli charts displacement and knowing, rhythm and resistance—a testament to what we hold dear and what legacies we carry.
Advance Praise
“Here is a thoroughly rigorous Filipino American hip hop poetics in full effect, in full affect, a heavily gorgeous feat of language that happens only inside the bass-booming quiet of witness. Through these joined joints, from interior mournings of East Oakland through Outer Mission through Ilocos Norte, crossing the Bay Bridge, David Maduli gathers sonic and semiotic through an intimate and expansive atlas of spraycan sighs and saxophone cry-outs, homelands and diasporas, Town and City, lolas and mothers, fathers and lolos, histories and futures, loss and remembrance. On one side, demonstrating the depths of an Alemany elegy on Bataan standard time, and on the other side, inventing and breaking new visual poetic form to honor universes that groove in and grow out of vinyl records, this double-chapbook / double-album / double-drop / dalawang bagsak talaga, tied tightly together by patient hand and imagination, shall stay hella fresh on bookshelves for generations and generations.”
—Jason Magabo Perez, San Diego Poet Laureate 2023-24
“Sometimes the most profound assertions in poetry are the ones made of the smallest gestures. We exist in a world where poetry is often written with a capital P and yet David Maduli crafts poetry devoid of such trappings and reliant on the quietude of everyday life. The love of family and place and a grandmother’s memory and yet how can we not hold dear the wisdom of a record collection. So put on a record. Open up this book. Know that you are reading the very breath that is life.”
—Truong Tran, author of book of the other: small in comparison
“David Maduli swings open the back door of his idling Hyundai Excel so we can pop inside to listen to this ‘pen’s lineage,’ the ‘ancestories’ of elder —Lola and Lolo reverberating from Bataan to the inside of ‘this house’ on Alemany as the fog rolls into the city. Then Maduli mashes the gas, hops out to a cul-de-sac party in East Oakland where he deftly spins an ‘ode amplified’ to hip-hop, soul, jazz and the artistry, collaboration, and community that makes it all happen. Record cover sonnets! Brilliant as the ‘inside of two eyes looking into the sun’! I’m forever a fan.”
—Rachelle Cruz, author of God’s Will for Monsters
David S. Maduli’s poetry, often inflected by many years as a DJ, public school teacher and father, has received the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize. Born in San Francisco, he is the grandson of a family matriarch who was the oldest of ten and first of the family to immigrate from the Philippines, who lived into her 100s in her home in the Outer Mission. A longtime resident of East Oakland, Lisjan Ohlone land, David completed his MFA at Mills College with a fellowship in Community Poetics. His work has been showcased in RAWdance’s Step/Song/Story series, and his poems appear recently in Sonora Review, Cream City Review, Kweli Journal, as well as the anthologies Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States (Paloma Press) and The Town: An Anthology of Oakland Poets (Nomadic Press). In addition to his current work with schools and districts across the state and beyond, he is an instructor in the MFA in Writing program at Lindenwood University. Please visit his website davidmaduli.com for more information.
Sampaguita Press 