Region IV-A: Joel

Toledo’s ruminative, lyrical verses reveal an interior world as

lush as a canopy and as irresistible as sadness. His poetry
asserts that even as the exterior world makes real all our
M. Toledo
abstractions, it is beyond its powers to faithfully reflect what
runs inside the human machine. In Toledo’s work, the exterior
world is all we have, while the self slips ever out of
reach. “The problem with the world is that it lacks the
patience of light,” he writes, but it is precisely this problem
that makes Toledo’s poetry luminous.
• Joel M. Toledo (born 1972) is a poet, fictionist, critic, and journalist
based in Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines. He has been granted
residencies by the Rockefeller Foundation[1] in Bellagio, Italy, and the
International Writing Program (IWP)[2] in Iowa, United States.
•
He grew up in the town of Silang, Cavite.[3] He holds a master’s degree
in poetry from the University of the Philippines in Diliman, where he also
finished two undergraduate degrees (creative writing and journalism).[4][5]
• Works
• Poetry
•The Blue Ones Are Machines, (2017, Vagabond Press, Australia)[6]
• Fault Setting (2016, University of the Philippines Press) [7]

• Ruins and reconstructions (2011, Anvil Publishing)[8]

• The Long Lost Startle (2009,University of the Philippines Press) [9]

• Chiaroscuro (2008, University of Santo Tomas Press) [4]

 • Fiction

• Pedro and the Lifeforce (1997, Giraffe Books) [10][11]

• Anthologies

• Under the Storm: An Anthology of Contemporary Philippine

Poetry (Co-editor, 2011, Antithesis Collective)[12]
• Caracoa 2006 (2006, Co-Editor) [13][14]
• Awards, prizes, and fellowships
• 2006 2nd and 3rd Prize Winner, Bridport Prize for Poetry Dorset, UK [15][16]

• 2011 International Writing Program Fellowship, Iowa, US [2]

• 2011 Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Writing Residency (Poetry), Bellagio, Italy
[1]

• 2005-2006 Philippine National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) Writers Prize Recipient [17]

• First Prize, 2005 Don Carlos Palanca Awards for Poetry in English (What Little I Know of Luminosity) [18]

• Second Prize, 2004 Don Carlos Palanca Awards for Poetry in English (Literature and Other Poems) [18]

• 2006 Meritage Press Award for Poetry [19]

SOME PERFORMANCES OF JOEL M. TOLEDO
 Fault Setting: Poems

• “Here’s to homecoming, my friends,” Joel Toledo writes in his magnificent new book, Fault Setting. “Cheers to resistances.”
Each poem in this collection is indeed a form of homecoming and an essay in resistance, a map of the heart that will
guide readers into new worlds and ways of being. He is a poet who believes that “Sorrow can be alleviated.” And this book
is proof of that.— Christopher Merrill, author of BoatToledo’s Fault Setting is propelled by the tentative: grave
enunciations—stories, soliloquies, musings—tempered by subtle wit, conceits, tangents that reveal a strange eye through
which the world’s fallibility is understood, in the meantime. There is no longer that surefooted voice of insight one might
have loved in his early poetry, making this collection even more haunting, dangerous, and powerful—precisely for its
ellipses, for its idiom, for the necessary slippages.— Allan J. PastranaLuminous, wizened, and witty—and that’s just the
first ten poems. In, for instance, a poem centrifuged on silver and its many cultural implications and references, the skill is
in hopscotching from history to geopolitics to sports to something as heartbreakingly personal as a tear on a dying
mother’s eye, only to end with “(t)hat quiet jubilation behind the gold.” These new poems radiate a renewed confidence in
tone and stride, rhythm and rhetoric. Toledo’s strange genius is for startling declaratives. And the turns of phrases have
the impact of a fist to the gut, or in the poet’s own words, “neither breeze nor sunray” but “something gradual, like
anesthesia / kicking in, a letter understood / years after.”— Lourd de Veyra
 Chiaroscuro (2008, University of Santo
Tomas Press)

• https://news.abs-cbn.com/lifestyle/08/19/08/review-joel-toledos-chiaroscur
o-pits-art-nostalgia-versus-childhood-demons
 Pedro and the Lifeforce (1997, Giraffe
Books)
• Philippine Chapter Book. Pedro and the Lifeforce is the story of 14 year old
Pedro who is thrust into early maturity when his father is killed. At about the
same time, Sta. Ines, his home barrio, is hit by severe drought. His younger
brother, Pablo, lies dying of a strange malady and begs for water to drink. A
reluctant hero, Pedro undertakes a journey to look for water to save his
brother's life. In the process, he meets and overcomes the three Chosens,
whoa re the keepers of three segments of the magic Crystal, to which he
alone unwittingly holds the key. Pedro shows character traits needed for the
success of his quest: faith, persistence, unselfishness and humility.
Under the Storm: An Anthology of Contemporary
Philippine Poetry

• Under the Storn is a compilation of 150 poems from an eclectic mix of 150
Filipino poets: from the renowned and the known to the upcoming and the
knowable. It explores the topography of the phenomenal, social, and lingual
developments in contemporary Philippine poetry. This is not simply a gathering
of the intelligent, it is a harvesting of works by the willing and the devoted to the
labor of crafting, the human turn, and the myriad possibilities of language. (less)