In Vincenz Serrano’s Now is a new no, a descendant of Baudelaire’s flâneur haunts Manila, crossroads of the Pacific and site of 400 years of Western colonialism, exploring ruins, bridges, relationships, and buildings, such as an old American hotel in which new life tries to flower, even though “a souvenir,” as Serrano writes, “is a corpse of a journey.” Transforming formal and theoretical modes influential in Western modernism, employing collage, photographs, patterning, and a gift for the aphoristic, this moving and innovative collection cracks open the burdens of history to find wisdom and empathy. “Dismantlement leads to the new,” we learn, and through such dazzling dismantling—and remantling—emerges the hope that even among so much destruction, now might also offer a new maybe—or maybe even a fraught, fragile yes.
—Donna Stonecipher, author of The Ruins of Nostalgia
Published in 2024.