By turns playful and tender, offering a formally-various exploration of migration, community, and nursing... there is honesty, musicality, a powerful heart
Seán Hewitt, The Irish Times *Best Poetry Books of 2020*
Captivating...playful...moving, witty and agile...These poems have a tended quality, as though Ante's kindness as a nurse extended to them. She is an unforced poet with a lightness of touch and fortitude, not neglecting to see her situation within a wider cultural and historical context
Kate Kelloway, Observer *Poetry Book of the Month*
A poetry of rapturous images and riveting conscience
Tracy K. Smith
Romalyn Ante is a poet to fall in love with. A flower of both the Philippines and the Black Country, her vivid, sensual poems weave a fascinating and moving story of migration and loss, caring and tenderness
Liz Berry
[A] tour-de-force
Jhalak Prize
What might it mean to survive the incandescent distances between here and all we’ve ever left behind—the languages, the myths, the keepsakes and names? How can we return to lost things and those who love us, relearn what draws away from memory? Romalyn Ante traces paths back through such questions with the grace of lancets, illuminating scars and landscapes, celebrating the “invisible…goddesses of caring and tending” in this brilliant collection. It is something of miracle to experience a debut that charts our "dislocated world" with such incisive generosity. I am beyond grateful for these poems—each one pulsing with “the rhythm of a shockable heart.”
R.A. Villanueva
Ante's poems are like embers, pared back to a slow-burning emotional core whose intensity she sustains elegantly throughout the collection
Stephanie Sy-Quia, Times Literary Supplement
Poignant, beautiful, and meditative writing on movement - living in a foreign country, being away from one's family, speaking a language not quite your own... This is possibly the most beautiful thing I have read this year
Maria Lewandowska, The Poetry School *Poetry Books of the Year*
Ante writes with a voice that I can only imagine develops when the act of care is central to one's life. She minces no words. Antiemetic for Homesickness manages to stand so coherently as a collection on account of how the poems' polyphony of voices interact with one another. We are at the mercy of her retort to those who underestimate immigrant workers
Holly Loveday, Wild Court
Romalyn Ante's debut collection presents an important and magical display of culture and perspective. There is always that memory that pervades someone's mind of what it is to migrate from one's home to another place. How are the people back home? The people who were left behind, how are they? Have they changed? [Antiemetic for Homesickness] aims to tackle those questions with folklore and spirit and honor
Shaun Anto, Columbia Journal
