OFFICIAL RELEASE DATE: March 15, 2022

Balikbayan is a dynamic lyric exploration of home, family, and identity split between oceans. As Pulmano defines it in the opening pages, a “balikbayan” is a Filipino person returning to the Philippines after time spent in another country, and this is the role the speaker of these poems inhabits: moving in spirit, memory, and geography between a family home in New Jersey and an extended family home in Las Pinas. Like the “balikbayan boxes” ritually sent to family overseas, this chapbook is a love letter to the complexity and joy in a dual heritage, “destination bleeding into origin, the way a love letter brings the recipient there to read the words as you write them…But family knows no oceans, my Lolo would say.”

PRAISE FOR BALIKBAYAN:

“What a joy it is to read Jeremy Pulmano’s Balikbayan. In poems intimate and fierce and wholly his own, Pulmano sings to us an elegy for the past and an ode for the future. A book of real devotion and celebration. Scintillating.”

—Michael Dickman, author of Days & Days, Green Migraine, and The End of the West

“Sensuous, searching and precocious, Jeremy Pulmano's Balikbayan is a second-generation love song to his Filipino family. His post-colonial melancholia and nostalgia comes with painterly tones, a palpable sense of affection for his family, both close and far, and a hint of lyric violence."

—Ken Chen, author of Juvenilia

”Purple ice cream, the twang of knife on cutting board, the ‘eight-rayed sun’: how vividly the world comes to Jeremy Pulmano. And how sharply he senses himself within it, and sometimes at odds with it. He knows his suit is cheap, he feels ‘the yellow in this skin,’ he sees ‘strangers in N95s’ swerving to avoid him. He is ‘indigenous to a place that ain’t here.’ But these wittily warm poems make their home, murmuring the names of relation – my Tito, my Kuya, my Lolo, my Mom, my brother, my lover. For all their bright particularity, they are large and open-hearted, the poems of a poet who knows he was born to be ‘sky/upon sky upon sky.’”

—James Richardson, author of During and By the Numbers


Jeremy Pulmano is a Filipino-American poet and software engineer from New Jersey living in Arlington, Virginia. He graduated from Princeton University with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and a certificate in Creative Writing. His poems have appeared in The Dillydoun Review, Periphery Journal, Lucky Jefferson, Arch & Arrow, and The Nassau Literary Review. In between the writing, he loves to dance, play guitar, and nap longer than he should. Balikbayan is his first collection.