Childhood memories are like deep-sea giants, shaped by the strength of tides and ancestral waters. From these depths emerge the maps of Alden Arsèn’s poems. Like a cartographer, the poet charts his own life alongside the culture and quiet lives shaped by the island and the sea. His verses guide us toward the port of the heart—a place of stillness, innocence, family, and hope.

The second part of the collection articulates his mastery of structure and line cutting. Arsèn demonstrates a keen sensitivity in seeking the right mood for each poem, allowing form and feeling to move in quiet balance. His poems invite us to drift through the currents and forgotten routes of who we are—the cuttings—so that we may begin again through a new journey, a way of mending.

— Cindy Velasquez

This collection is an extended eulogy. It contains the bitter anguish and the tired surrendering of being orphaned, of losing loved ones, of loneliness. The poems gathered in this tender and pensive collection are the stretching of that anguish and surrendering into fine threads. And afterwards, a careful mending to stitch back all the wounds left scarred by the efforts of living on. Many will talk about this collection in the years to come. I am also certain that it will deeply move its readers as it has moved me.

— John Danté

Alden’s debut poetry collection powerfully lends the remembering self. Here, grief is a language as tender as it is poignant that gently carries us to the immensity of human experience, to his sensibilities both as a being and a poet (which I call “being poet”). In reading Sigay, we become one with the remembering self who chooses to never forget.

— Ken Oray

Alden writes with restraint that is nonetheless profoundly affecting. The prose leans on tenderness, nostalgia, and muted sorrow rather than overt anguish. The cumulative effect is a gentle ache, a recognition that love endures not because it is loud, but because it lingers, stitched into memory, the body, and language, even after death.

— Rodrigo Almonicar

The poet cuts himself open in this collection, and instead of tissues that scream for mending, inside is his soft soul, putli and raw—pleading for more rips. The amount of Alden Arsèn’s courage to be as fragile as the mollusk outside its shell is immense and personal, clearly observed in each of his lines. His poetry are sigays picked up with all the intent of precision and care to keep them somewhere in pages.  Fascinating how the immeasurable love is folded into nth time and compressed in short lines. Subtly reminds that not all tiny things are small. Now, whenever I see tiny shells, first thing I’ll remember is Alden Arsèn’s classy art.

— Jevin Astillero

Reading the collection, I can feel the hands at work: the same hands that learned how to cut cleanly, to mend what frays, to cradle memory the way you cradle a sigay. A palm warm, breath held, an architecture intact. Alden makes ritual out of the ordinary: noodles parted like hair before braiding, banana cue sugared to a dusk‑bright sheen, cloth lowered into water the way worry is lowered, carefully into silence. The voices arrive like wind off the shoreline, amihan turning to habagat, each one carrying salt and story. A child pockets what can be carried after the gust takes what cannot; a son leans toward a mother’s voice that flickers between presence and prayer; someone returns to Room 03B to stand in the quiet machinery of a life that nearly slipped away. None of this is disguise. It is an act of carrying. Of widening the self to hold what was lost and what remains. Here, the poems do not pretend to repair, they honor each crack. They trace edges the way a seamstress fingers the line before the stitch, deciding with the surety of line breaks, with the patience of thread what to keep and what to finally let go. The shoreline, field, dormitory, lola’s needle, thresholds, all of them, where care outlasts damage like a banig that keeps its weave. SIGAY AND OTHER POEMS is the work of a poet who knows our inner weather, who listens the way one listens at dawn in a house still smelling of steam and sugar full of tender, and faithful to language’s most human task: to keep what matters.

— Joseph Fernandez

Arsèn writes with a blade of light, carving truth from the silences surrounding masculinity, gender, and sexuality. His poems refuse performance; instead, they offer a steady, unflinching gaze at what it means to inhabit a body shaped by expectation and desire. With language both tender and unsparing, he dismantles inherited myths and rebuilds identity from lived experience.

— Brixter Tino