In Imago, his debut collection of luminous, elegiac poems, Joseph O. Legaspi bravely documents a boy’s painful and poignant rites of passage in becoming a man. Richly evoking the landscapes of the Philippines and immigrant America, Imago depicts the desires of an uprooted family, which translates into a son’s powerful voice of self-reckoning.


... Legaspi, like William Carlos Williams, can find poetry anywhere. And like his mentor Pablo Neruda he seems able to locate the mysterious and the magical in the most common and overlooked objects ... his entire Philippine coming of age pursues him with its old potency, and the poems born of this inner turmoil shift seamlessly into a surrealistic mode in which his dreams seem more authentic than his ordinary day by day life ... It is difficult to over-estimate the daring and resourcefulness required to complete successfully this astonishingly original book.


…[P]oems forged from a devotion and keenness about the sometimes violent transformations from boyhood to manhood. It takes a good measure of courage to pass so slowly through anguish, but it takes an equal, if not greater amount of courage to move wholly and convincingly through joy. In Imago, such courage is clear, and Joseph O. Legaspi has the abundant poetic skill to describe it.


The poems in Imago are surreal, strangely erotic and absolutely necessary ... The narratives tackle the familiar themes of racial and sexual identity with vivid imagery and wild juxtapositions. In short, these immigrant narratives sizzle!  The book opens to this amazing first sentence: “As soon as we became men/my brother and I wore skirts.” The family tales are over the top. The father is an unforgettable character; he is larger than life and is always eating—munching on mackerel or “slurping eggyolk.” A compelling first book and a fun read!