Matadora
Sarah Gambito
2005 Global Filipino Literary Award for Poetry
This vivid, incisive, feminist debut skewers Filipina American gender roles with its delightful sense of humor. With seriocomic tone, these elliptical lyrics reveal illusions and exclusions at the heart of America’s global narrative of economic “progress,” and the attendant loss of cultural identity and memory. At the same time,Matadora challenges traditional Filipina gender norms, beginning with the title which feminizes a word and profession traditionally masculine.
"Every once in a while a poetry book bursts onto the scene—heavy with luggage tagged from all manner of airports—just begging to be unpacked....Matadora introduces us to a fearless new talent, whose voice is sure to be a significant and sexy siren call—compelling us to return again and again to the poems in this remarkably stunning debut collection."
—Mid-American Review
“…employs a cryptic, staccato style that implies much more than meets the eye.”
—Library Journal
"When I read Sarah Gambito`s poetic debut, Matadora, I was devastated the way only poetry can bowl you over if you sit down for a minute and read with your heart and mind wide open….With her nimble, inscrutable poems, Gambito tells us: poetry is to talk to God, make God talk and then talk back again to God."
—Tamiko Beyer, chopblock.com
"In Sarah Gambito’s first book, a world is reborn and so to accommodate it the speaker assumes just so many multiple elations, all of them daughters and sisters of the things of the world. These poems fly in from other countires. They blur the speed of prayers with alt.rock lyrics. In the poems continents reverse themselves as if drifting in amniotic fluid, lines of lineage re-emerge and voices in other languages adopt themselves to various new forms of speech. The speaker arrives from time to time. She is like snow. She takes short holidays. She smiles at birthday cards. She can eat anything that doesn’t criticize her. Some of her ex-lovers were not teenagers. She flits from Tagalog to East Villagese. She has a halogen stereo and waits for 'my late great Chachi.' She goes to clubs and raw bars and a street in Tagatay. She tries on her butterfly kite. Through all this, she is the breathless sum of her various accoutrements: crystal and sea-egg, a borealis, a lamp, a holidaypipe, a Paloma, a sister. A beautiful book."
—Tan Lin
"The poems in Sarah Gambito's first book, Matadora, are sheer juxtapositions of anything--star fish, Tagalog, frisson-- and the friction very often adds a political dimension to the poetic. Lovely!"
—Kimiko Hahn
"Early in Sarah Gambito’s book, we learn that 'You cannot be in two places at once.' In fact, the personality presented in these poems (they are personal poems; that is to say, they have their own unique and consistent personality) seems to have come from Elsewhere, on the way to Everywhere."
—Keith Waldrop
about the author
Sarah Gambito holds degrees from The University of Virginia (B.A.) and Brown University (M.F.A.). Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, The Antioch Review, The New Republic, Quarterly West, Fence and other journals. She lives in New York City.
Author photo by Valerie Trucchia
