In The Time Between, poems burrow deep inside rusty rooms, the brachiated hearts of sleepless women, the anguish pounding the fault lines of monsoons and long rains, the sheets of ancient wound and anger, the littered and abandoned alleyways of shell-shocked hamlets and towns. The infinitude of time sears, no greater or less than the mind and memory recovers through the stubborn hissing of distant flames burning. Time runs, ambivalent to grief.

To be you and I, to be like us, to be the blade caught in the metal cage of seconds, minutes, hours -- to be man, woman and child now, in the time between -- to be at home here in the world. To know how hard it is to bleed, to carry the silence that unceasingly grows dim and dark, Why eyes look outward, not inward.

These poems nibble at arguments, re-enact double lives of betrayed dreams, invent the beatitude of mourning, yet always seeking, always on the lookout for the radiance of hope that resists fading at dawn.

Patria Rivera’s first poetry collection, Puti/White, was shortlisted for the 2006 Trillium Book Award for Poetry. She has also published The Bride Anthology, BE, and The Time Between, and co-authored two chapbooks: Six from the Sixth and Weathering: An Exchange of Poems. Her poetry is featured in Oxford University Press’s Perspectives in Ideology, and in Elana Wolff’s Implicate me: Short Essays on Reading Contemporary Poems, as well as in the Toronto Public Library’s Online Culture Series. She has received fellowships from the Writers’ Union of Canada, the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Hawthornden Castle Writers’ Retreat in Scotland, and the Nieman Center for Journalism at Harvard University. She graduated with a journalism degree from the University of the Philippines.

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