July 2024

Thomas Leonard Shaw is a queer, liminal poet-critic who lives in perpetual transit from Siargao to Metro Manila. Once a Creative Writing student and Palanca Foundation scholar at the University of the Philippines Diliman, and a poetry fellow at the 1st Philippine National LGBTQ Writers Workshop, the 1st Cebu Young Writers Studio, and 26th Iligan National Writers’ Workshop, Thomas now majors in Comparative Literature, and studies what it means to be a writer and critic in this global age of cultural and artistic production. He was an awardee at the 2019 Amelia Lapeña Bonifacio Literary Awards and has been published by Voice and Verse Magazine. With a research interest in memory studies and the intersections between literature, history and imperial expansion, he hopes to one day teach literature and to help organize the first creative writing workshop in Siargao. His current project is an exploration of the dialectics between memory and history in the fiction of Angelica Gorodischer.

  • Brief Notes on Jaya Jacobo’s Arasahas

    I have always been fascinated with poetry that traverses the terrains of the physical, natural world, and attendant to the world of experience, of the spirit. I enjoy poetry that casts enchantment, not just necessarily from allusions to magic, specters, or other figurations of mystical otherness, but through the very experiential energies of a persona…

  • On Politics over Kutsinta

    for Kuya Kutsinta Every Sunday after mass at my Protestant church, a kuya would shout unto church-comers to buy his kutsinta, sold in a white, translucent bucket he carried on his back. When asked about his recipe, he would smile and laugh and cross a hand over his heart; it was made with love, he…

  • Sonic

    For my grandfather, Tomàs   I only know what I am told. Such as the continents you wish to conquer, charted on maps on a decaying wall, a memento  of islands and archipelago, en tous lieux, scattered. Or the waves entombed in the cache of your journal, flagged by the red ribbon suspended in its…

  • You and Who Remembers 

    You and Who Remembers  First light at the district. The avenues barely scorched, and already men and women swarm the streets in their tired suits. Dealers, clerks, aides, an entire colony of commerce trying to catch the minute and its quick steps. Even the sparrows, tired of their melancholy songs, are poised to flee their…

  • Two Poems

    Pony Ride   At the emergency room, trauma and tragedy slip in and out of the door. Here is a carousel of chances, lifeline gliding and bobbing in circles. Maybe we are all clowns for even trying. Sideshow oddities making a mark under the great big top of this cosmic joke. Applause and lion’s roar,…