Home Remedies by Amalia Bueno

Home Remedies is a salve made from organic rhythms and forms mixed with locally sourced images, characters, and voices from Hawaiʻi and the Philippines. As if by poetic magic, Amalia Bueno transforms coconut oil, paper seeds, and 500 lumpia into healing prayers. Apply these poems generously, dear reader, because they have the power to soothe our displaced, migratory, aging, forgotten, and incarcerated bodies.
–Craig Santos Perez, author, from unincorporated territory [guma’]

Amalia Bueno is a benevolent panopticon of a poet. She turns her gaze to characters (in all senses of the term) in the Philippines and Hawaiʻi. These poems are playful and exuberant. But the centerpiece of this collection is a sequence of documentary poems about incarcerated women. Bueno’s empathetic ear hears them counting the time they’re spending in prisons, often far from their homes in the Islands. Home may be a remedy, but where is it when you’re displaced? Of “Moringa Oreifera,” a Himalayan plant that grows in Hawaiʻi, she writes: “I harvest your body / and see our kin, the kind that grows // overseas, placed and displaced only / to root again among ourselves.” For this poet, “root” is as much verb as noun, but both find themselves firmly attached to earth, wherever that earth may be.
–Susan M. Schultz, author, Dementia Blog, editor and publisher, Tinfish Press