M of the Southern Downpours

M of the Southern Downpours is Alton Melvar M Dapanas’ second collection of prose poems. Dapanas, a resident of the in-betweenness of genres and forms as a prose poet and lyric essayist, crafts a book of poems which are part unsent letter to the dead, part lyric topography of their hometown, and part poetic centones from urban literatures and place-writings of Mahmoud Darwish, Richard Siken, Yun Dong-ju, Vivek Shraya, Jody Chan, Golnoosh Nour, and Gaspar Orozco. In this ’spellbook of poems’, in the words of polyglot poet Kiran Bhat, Dapanas meditates on southern Philippine cityscapes: from the stretch of Velez Street to Sayre Highway’s edge, from hotel fire exits to unpeopled bus stops along the coastal drive. In M of the Southern Downpours, readers find traces of various intertexts such as Conchitina Cruz’s poetic sequence ’Geography Lesson, ’ Taylor Swift’s lyric discography (especially ’folklore’ and ’evermore’), Donika Kelly’s ’Sanctuary, ’ and the incantations from Mamanwa mythos and old Catholic monodies in Binisaya sung during Lent. As queer scholar Wen-chi Li wrote, Dapanas’ prose poems ’are both a tender embrace and a daring confession.’

’M of the Southern Downpours is an immensely relatable collection of prose poems to anyone who belongs to the queer experience. A raw and abrasive spellbook of poems, Dapanas has curated memory and emotion with a telling eye for detail. The poems churn the page with longing, nostalgia, horniness and regret.’

- Kiran Bhat, author of Speaking in Tongues: Poems in Spanish, Mandarin, and Turkish (Red River, 2022)

’Dive into the lush, pulsating world of M of the Southern Downpours & Other Prose Poems, where the rhythm of rain-soaked streets and the whisper of hidden desires merge into an intoxicating symphony. With a nod to the poetic murmurs of Proust, this collection invites you to dance through the memories of intimate encounters shared among gay individuals. From the clandestine corners of motels to the electric buzz of city nightlife, Dapanas crafts prose poems that are both a tender embrace and a daring confession. Each piece is a brushstroke on the canvas of contemporary Philippine society, revealing the raw, unfiltered emotions of longing, discovery, and acceptance. M of the Southern Downpours is not just a collection of poems; it’s a journey-a bold exploration of love, loss, and the unyielding pursuit of authenticity amidst the chaos of life.’

- Dr Wen-chi Li, Taiwanese tongzhi (queer) literature scholar, translator, and poet, University of Oxford.

’Alton Melvar M Dapanas’ M of the Southern Downpours is a collection of honestly crafted poems that explores the vast universe of a poet whose clarity about the world in all of its bareness will arrest you. Here is a poet, wrestling with the things we all wrestle every day, the restlessness of youth, reality and fantasy, memory, love, calm. Page after page is storytelling that leads you down one road through the lyricism of a master poet in the making. Alton is a poet at ease with the shocking things words can do to a page. On one page, you’ll find tightly woven lyrics, the music of all the poet’s many words, American and Asia at once, and on the next page, prose poems about the other world where we go when we seem to lose the real world around us, a haunting duality of existence between wakefulness and dream. These poems will keep the reader alert because you don’t know what’s coming at you on the next page. Here is a poet at peace and at war, the nakedness of erotic images that knock you out of your seat. ... These lines crave a place in your heart, a must read, an urgently necessary voice, that voice we all desire in poetry.’

- Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, PhD, Poet Laureate of Liberia and author of Praise Song for My Country (2024)