The Tomato Woman

Bea Bolongaita

Named Book of the Week by The Bridge (Brooklyn Poets)

A “powerful collection” (Adam Clay) of poems from “a voice that demands engagement and attention with each vulnerable confession” (K.E. Ogden), Bea Bolongaita’s debut chapbook The Tomato Woman rewrites a traditional Midwestern coming-of-age story within the context of Filipina American identity. Familial relationships go from tender to tense. Growing pains bloom like mint in a garden. Teenage boys, inevitably, annoy. In conversation with Phoebe Bridgers’ melancholic lyricism and the love poetry of Ada Limón, Bolongaita inserts herself in the coming-of-age canon: By bringing together academic writing, colloquial speech, talk-backs to colonial anthropologists, and uncanny images of nature and adolescence, Bolongaita traverses the boundaries between history and love, motherhood and daughterhood, sobriety and intoxication, comedy and tragedy, and violence and intimacy to create a new understanding of growing up and girlhood.

Published in the Spring 2023 Collection.

  • “What grows in the garden of the self? The Tomato Woman charts the possibilities between countries, cultures, family, love, and perception... There is a tender ache that blooms in these pages, an ache born between knowing who you are and who you can become."

    Ruth Awad, author of Set Music to a Wildfire

  • "Bea Bolongaita's powerful collection The Tomato Woman captures fleeting moments with certainty and precision. The poems continually 'make something / of a memory' through their synthesis of joy and sorrow, of love and loss, slowing down time to examine life not as we remember it but rather life as it actually is..."

    Adam Clay, author of To Make Room for the Sea & editor-in-chief of The Mississippi Review

  • "For Bolongaita, Filipinx identity provides a tender frame for this often inexplicable ache, which throbs across and through bodies linked over generations by the circuits of imperialism still animating the conditions of the present."

    Travis Chi Wing Lau, author of Vagaries & Paring

  • "These urgent poems are... a voice that demands engagement and attention with each vulnerable confession."

    K.E. Ogden, author of What the Body Already Knows

  • "With punch and panache, Bolongiata enacts a kind of poetic transubstantiation..."

    Michael Leong, author of Words on Edge & Who Unfolded my Origami Brain?

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