Overview

Exploring queerness, belonging, and the meaning of home through the lens of a Filipino American How does a queer brown body move through the American panorama? In Amphibian, Joseph O. Legaspi explores the metaphor of ""amphibious living""—adapting, surviving, and flourishing in varying geographies—as it pertains to immigrants and to queerness. These poems draw on the natural world to illuminate personal experiences and, in turn, closely examine cultural, environmental, and societal constructs and concerns. Legaspi searches in nature for evidence of the validity of his own existence, determined to declare his belonging. Dwelling in landscape as a guide into the interior, Amphibian journeys not only between earth, water, and air, but also into the past, cataloging an immigrant's departures, arrivals, and returns to native soil. This moving collection is at every turn liberating, fraught, and altered.

Full Product Details

Author:   Joseph O. Legaspi
Publisher:   Curbstone Press
Imprint:   Curbstone Press
Weight:   0.454kg
ISBN:  

9798899480072

Pages:   104
Publication Date:   15 April 2026
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Not yet available  
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Table of Contents

I. Land In Medias Res Grace Feasting Longyi, a Lyric In the Tropics Weeding/Wedding Your Mother Wears a House Dress Father of the Graveyard Twilight Kissing My Father II. Shore Hamburger ÓkÚrÚ Ode to Table Grapes (Sultana) Mongrel Lotusland Canandaigua When God Came Passing Through an Artist Colony in the Hudson Valley Immigrant Spring Ants Old Sage of Siquijor Manongs’ Lament III. Water Sketches from a Childhood Sea My father washes his hands. To Boil Water A Rush and a Push and the Land Is Ours Dear hammerhead, The Stones Underlife To Boil Water (ii) Two Figures on a Boat Eye IV. Ether Family, an Ars Poetica Ode to Dragon Fruit (Pitaya) Culture Bringing Home the Ox The House of Your Childhood Is Smaller than Memory Quita y Pone Anthropause Zuihitsu Urban Jungle Meteorology The last night you were alive Aurora Frog V. Air Distance First World On an Island (New York City) Zuihitsu: Jackson Heights, Spring 2020 Ducks Easter, Bonifacio High Street At the Simply Butterflies Conservation Center Someone Heaven in Grand Central Station The Tree Sparrows Amphibians Notes Acknowledgments

Reviews

""Legaspi's Amphibian is teeming with rich musicality, aromatic imagery, and striking turns. It excels at weaving its narrative sense of recollection and its lyric sense of wonder, creating an immaculate tapestry for rendering, and reckoning with, the depths of longing. This is a true ecological mural of relational belonging."" --Geffrey Davis, author of One Wild Word Away ""Amphibian is a book of feverish wonders. Tadpoles and immigrants fall out of the sky, mothers with Cleopatra eyes melt into martyrdom, soup boils thicker than blood. Legaspi is a poet of the senses. The heat is palpable, the poems sing."" --Jessica Hagedorn, author of Dogeaters ""These exquisite poems explore what it means to be amphibious--and the malleability and alchemy required to thrive in two different terrains. Rich in imagery and cultural and familial ceremonies, Amphibian is as stunning as Legaspi's last collection, Threshold."" --R. Zamora Linmark, author of Pop Vérité

""Legaspi's Amphibian is teeming with rich musicality, aromatic imagery, and striking turns. It excels at weaving its narrative sense of recollection and its lyric sense of wonder, creating an immaculate tapestry for rendering, and reckoning with, the depths of longing. This is a true ecological mural of relational belonging."" —Geffrey Davis, author of One Wild Word Away ""Amphibian is a book of feverish wonders. Tadpoles and immigrants fall out of the sky, mothers with Cleopatra eyes melt into martyrdom, soup boils thicker than blood. Legaspi is a poet of the senses. The heat is palpable, the poems sing."" —Jessica Hagedorn,author of Dogeaters ""These exquisite poems explore what it means to be amphibious—and the malleability and alchemy required to thrive in two different terrains. Rich in imagery and cultural and familial ceremonies, Amphibian is as stunning as Legaspi's last collection, Threshold."" —R. Zamora Linmark, author of Pop Vérité

Author Information

Joseph O. Legaspi is the author of two previous poetry collections, Threshold and Imago, and of three chapbooks: Postcards; Aviary, Bestiary; and Subways. He works at Columbia University, teaches at Fordham University, and resides with his husband in Queens, New York.

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