RIGEL PORTALES (poet & student)
GOD / I ASKED / TO BE SAVED / NOT SALVE / NOT SALVAGE / NOT SALT / BUT THE WATER.
From "Inferno" in Frontier Poetry
BOOK/S
DEAD BOYS MAKE THE BEST MEN (FlowerSong Press, 2023)
Order within the Philippines
Order from the US and Overseas
DEAD BOYS MAKE THE BEST MEN is a daydream of masculinity, its logic and its languor. In this collection of poetry, men hold buses hostage while also fixing their son's airconditioner; boys play basketball before they die prematurely. What survives within this chapbook are their impressions, half-remembered but desperate to live a little bit longer.Amidst loss, longing, violence, desire and dark humor in the poems of Rigel Portales lies tenderness like “[…] what light goes through.” With his language and what he does and can do with it at his age to make sense of human condition and position should make us excited about what is next after DEAD BOYS MAKE THE BEST MEN that reminds us “What is instant/is local and lovable/not beloved, just bled [….]” - Vijae O. Alquisola | Teacher, WriterIn the last lines of the title-poem of this chapbook, the persona, talking to a dead friend, apparently says, "I’m having fun, writing to you..." The overall voice in this collection sounds just like that: having fun—with jokes, anecdotes, and vignettes, among others—playful and youthful. However, the poems in this collection are never funny; instead, they reveal an ironic seriousness in tone, filled with doubt and desire. Reading Rigel Portales’s poems is akin to "hold[ing] the blade/by the blade"—you realize his poems can certainly cut deep. - Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles | Teacher, WriterRigel Portales’ poetry cuts incisions in the psyches of those who are lucky enough to have read and felt them. In his collection, men who kill also mourn their dead. Boys come to terms with their desire for other boys. Knives and basketballs and altar servers’ frocks. The triumph of this collection is in how it carves into rage, desperation, and grief to find where love, desire, and hope are nestled. DEAD BOYS MAKE THE BEST MEN is an exploration of the complexities of what it means to be a man in this society, a letter of tenderness to men who have been starved of it. - Carlo Bautista | Writer
PUBLICATIONS
Book/s
• FlowerSong Press, 2023, "DEAD BOYS MAKE THE BEST MEN," a poetry chapbookPoetry
• Kritika Kultura, March 2023, "Dante's Paradise Encircles a Burning Girl," "David and Goliath,"
"IF ONLY I WAS IN HEAVEN #2"
• The Drift, February 2023, "Heartbreaking Breathtaking"
• moody zine, January 2023, "Mazda," "Breaking Down a 440kg Tiger Shark"
• Nat. Brut Magazine, December 2022, "Metroimperial Intimacies"
• Storm Cellar, December 2022, “The Usual Barbershop Is Closed and I Need To Be Cut”
• Frontier Poetry, August 2022, "Inferno"
• Palette Poetry, August 2022, "Enchanted is a Word for Haunted"
• lickety~split, March 2022, "Stewing"
• Sledgehammer Lit, January 2022 , "Can I Invite Her Over For Dinner?"
• Sledgehammer Lit, December 2021, "Procrustean Tendency"
• Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, October 2021, "The First Ever Moonman Remembers?"
• koening zine, October 2021, "Reasons for Moving 1. Out 2. Into the Flood"
• Ghost City Review, September 2021, "1 or 3 Tropical Cyclones in Your City"
• Oyster River Pages, August 2021, "Treating an In-Grown Toenail," "Still Life of Raw Meat"Prose
• The Awakenings Review, Fall 2021, "Everyday Hauntings after All the Exorcisms"
ABOUT
Rigel Portales is a 21-year-old Filipino poet afraid of disappearing. Fortunately, his works have appeared/are soon to appear on Kritika Kultura, Nat. Brut Magazine, The Drift, and Cha. He is the author of DEAD BOYS MAKE THE BEST MEN (FlowerSong Press, 2023), his debut poetry chapbook. He previously served as poetry editor for the Malate Literary Folio and as a reader for Palette Poetry. You can find him on his Twitter account @rijwrites where he writes to preserve and preserves to write.
Photo attributed to: Uriel Anne Bumanlag
Polo shirt attributed to: my dad
CONTACT DETAILS
Website background attributed to: "disco-church-wallpaper-4k" by Alexander RostovP.S. If you can't buy/access some of my poems, you can always contact me for a copy!