“Michelle Peñaloza is a poet like no other. [S]he brings babaylan-seer wisdom together with her infectious brand of humor to breathe life into bones, to farm language from split tongues, and to make music out of beef jerky and department store perfume. "

—Jen Soriano, award-winning author of Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing 

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Praise for

All The Words I Can Remember Are Poems

“Navigating humor and sorrow—and never neglecting the startling and subversive joy that can be found at their intersection—Michelle Peñaloza uses music and elegantly constructed moments of surprise to guide her reader with a seemingly effortless yet brilliantly deliberate hand. Transposing the mythologies and historical artifacts of an often buried Philippine history and the complex diasporic self-vision of a post-colonial Pinay daughter, Peñaloza’s All the Words I Can Remember Are Poems is a sure-footed and confident second collection that establishes this poet’s vision as distinct and unforgettable. These poems illuminate the expansive and specific perspective of a multilingual and multicultural speaker with playful precision and sophistication, utilizing modes and meanings that renew the power of storytelling. Here is an unapologetic voice, one that is not afraid to take up necessary space and to claim her belonging in the world, a voice that rings as clearly as a fiercely struck bell.”

— Tarfia Faizullah, Keetje Kuipers, and Barbara Jane Reyes, judges for the 2024 James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets

"Michelle Peñaloza's world -- overflowing with flowers, languages, ancestors, abundant dinners, laughter, longing, and endless questions -- is a delight. This book is a perfectly crafted home for all of us living in diaspora. Peñaloza's singular voice recasts both personal and global history: our losses are no longer just sites of grief, but totems of power and resilience. Colonialism never precludes indigenous triumph, reality never precludes hope. These poems make me feel whole."

—Angela Garbes, author of Essential Labor  and Like A Mother

Michelle Peñaloza is a poet like no other. In All the Words I can Remember are Poems, she brings babaylan-seer wisdom together with her infectious brand of humor to breathe life into bones, to farm language from split tongues, and to make music out of beef jerky and department store perfume. Peñaloza uses her remembered words to construct a bangka that allows the reader to journey from a violently forgotten past toward a deliberately reclaimed future. All the while she challenges us to puzzle the relationships between empire and the descendants of conquest, and to reclaim the goodness of our power and our longings. This collection is remarkable. It overflows with medicine and inspiration. I will be returning to it again and again and again.

—Jen Soriano, author of Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing