The achieve of, the mastery : filipino poetry and verse from English, mid- '90s to 2016 : the sequel habit of the shore, volume I / edited by Gemino H. Abad, Mookie Katigbak- Lacuesta

"This sequel anthology to A Habit of Shores (1999) offers a representative sample of Philippine poetry in English: “the achieve of” is where the poem has got to so far, today and tomorrow, as the poet’s own clearing in the wilderness of language; “the mastery of the thing” is where, through the poet’s agon or struggle with language, he’s got the poem-of-it so right it can’t be done again: the very thing itself, sui generis. The poem is both work of language, the poet’s Muse, and work of imagination, his spirit- guide. As tilled and wrought into a literary work, language becomes, by way of the writer’s imagination, the very ground of his people’s culture and history, their day-to-day living in their own time and place, because these circumscribe his own life experience. This is why our literature is our people’s memory, imagination’s heartland. A country is only as strong as her people’s memory. Indeed, our artists and scholars create our sense of country: they are our own best critics and interpreters."