The Violence of Waiting and Other Fairy Tales (a Poetry Collection)

“I wanted to get these out before I grew too old for the particular brand of millennial misery poems. Maybe later on I’ll call it the lost days. And maybe even later I’ll just call it by the names of the journeys it took to survive.

This series is a mixture of both Millennial Misery, biblical brimstones, and other fairy tales. Originally, I was going to write two collections: The Violence of Waiting and Fairy Tales and Other Stories About Love, but life happens. And besides, who was it that said grief, magic, joy and alchemy exist in the world at the same exact moments? All the strongest, most powerful stories are fairy tales – even then, they knew what it took to have a good apocalypse.

This is an ode to my early twenties.

Edit September 23, 2022: Three years ago, I said I would put this out into the world, before I became too old for it. Then again two years ago, and then again a year ago. Blink and so much life happens. Aside from my original poems, I attach here three letters from a series of postcards I’ve written to a close confidant. We wanted to publish an epistolary, something along the lines of “Best, : An Oral History of the Pandemic in the Philippines”. So now I treat them as excerpts, as borrowings from the future. A reminder that life happens. Once, a friend told me ‘If I were to be a reminder, let me be a gentle one.’ I always told her I would steal that one from her.

This edit is an ode to life, even during apocalypses.”

The Violence of Waiting and Other Fairy Tales - Miguel Alejandro A. Silan - 2020

(Link to PDF here)