What Others Say About Alden Arsen's Sigay and Other Poems
Like a cartographer, the poet charts his own life alongside the culture and quiet lives shaped by the island and the sea.
— Cindy Velasquez
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
Here, grief is a language as tender as it is poignant that gently carries us to the immensity of human experience…
— Ken Oray
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 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.
— Jevin Astillero
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
His poems refuse performance; instead, they offer a steady, unflinching gaze at what it means to inhabit a body shaped by expectation and desire.
— Brixter Tino
While the poems do not promise returning to an unscarred life, it proffers consolation that some things torn may still be held together, for, as in the poem Whip Stitch, this is as close as one comes to becoming whole.
— Al Jeffrey Gonzales
Perhaps the world actually revolves through poetry and not merely breathing. Such is the way of Arcenal and his poetry.
—Adie Orosco