[Hot Off the Press] Now is a new no

New poetry collection Now is a new no tenderly dissects the cracks and crevices of Manila 

“To walk through a city is to cut it into parts, like a wound or a landscape the city opens, then like a scab or a room it closes.” A new poetry collection from the Ateneo University Press, Now is a new no by Vincenz Serrano, gazes upon the cracks and crevices of past and present Manila with sharp yet tender eyes. 

To Serrano, the city is a living breathing creature, ever-changing, ever-moving. It is a creature that speaks yet lives in silences, and in these silences are multitudes of stories. Donna Stonecipher, author of The Ruins of Nostalgia praises his approach to these stories: “Transforming formal and theoretical modes influential in Western modernism, employing collage, photographs, patterning, and a gift for the aphoristic, this moving and innovative collection cracks open the burdens of history to find wisdom and empathy.” 

Each word and photograph in this collection is filled with intimacy, in that they pierce through time and space into the now, where the reader can become a witness to the city alongside the poet. Conchitina Cruz, author of Modus, highlights Serrano’s talent for witnessing: “To be in Vincenz Serrano’s Now is a new no is to rehearse what you see relentlessly. Is is hinge for here and there, you and I, long ago and long after to coincide and coalesce in poems that desire, again and again, to hold in place and time what would otherwise be adrift, to connect what would otherwise be apart. Dense like a city, thick with history, and expansive in its intimacy, Now is a new no accumulates, rearranges, and won’t discard; syntax is the site of its exquisite resistance to loss, its fierce refusal to let the this that emerges from relation recede from sight: ‘There is another poem but it is in this one.’”

Destruction is built into Manila’s bones. Jacob Edmond, author of Make It the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media, pinpoints how Serrano holds a microscope to the city’s artifice and the wounds beneath them: “What happens when the non-places of the rich—airports, hotel rooms, model apartment units—collide with the streets of Manila, worn by many feet, histories, and languages? Vincenz Serrano’s Now is a new no collages words and images to produce a ‘cut-up map of the city’ folded into other places and times and sutured so that the seams, keloid-like, show through. More than a book, it is an invitation to trace the indelible scar lines of the now.”

“In the ache of opposites, the city knows it is alive: crowd and solitude, old and new, beauty and decay, feeling and fact, silence and noise, grasp and emptiness.” This collection is an invitation for readers to see the city without the rose-tinted glasses. It is a tender dissection of Manila, holding every misshapen and broken piece to the light and watching it glisten. 

About the Author

Vincenz Serrano works in the Literary and Cultural Studies Program, Ateneo de Manila University.

Now is a new no is published by the Ateneo de Manila University Press under the Bughaw imprint. The book retails at PHP 675 and is available at the Ateneo University Press Bookshop in Bellarmine Hall, and the Press’s official Lazada and Shopee stores.

Get your copy in paperback: Website│Lazada and Shopee