Dear teacher-friends,

We hope your semester is going well (and if youre in between terms, happy vacation!). Were happy to
announce that we have just re-published Dark Hours, Conchitina Cruzs (Chingbee to most/all of you) first
poetry book. Dark Hours was first published by the University of the Philippines Press in 2005, and won the
National Book Award for Poetry in 2006. Its been out of print for a few years, and finally, this year, the Youth
& Beauty Brigade has managed to round up the necessary resources to do another print run.
We would like to invite you to require Dark Hours in your creative writing/literature/composition classes
the book has been required by an Australian professor in his architecture/urban planning class, so its
found an unlikely spot in certain reading lists. Some poems from the book and a couple of links on it are
included in this document. The book retails for P250, but if you require it, we can offer it to your students at
a discounted price of P220, and give you one (1) free copy for your personal use. Unfortunately, the Youth &
Beauty Brigade still does not enjoy a distribution system that spans the whole nation, so if you live outside
of Manila and the books need to be shipped to you, we will have to keep the price at P250 a copy (for a
minimum of 5 copies). But we will ship the books to you for free, and you still get a free copy.
To order, please email us at ybb.books@gmail.com. Let us know 1) how many copies you need, 2) when you
need the books (at least a week before the day you teach it would be a good target date), and 3) where we
need to deliver the books (we live in QC and should be able to deliver in the Manila area, otherwise well
have to ship to you). If you know anyone who might be interested in requiring the book in their class, please
forward this email to them and encourage them to get in touch with us. Thank you!
- Adam David
the Youth & Beauty Brigade

Dark Hours
Conchitina Cruz
Urban living / Poetry
8x8
88 pages
Perfect bound
ISBN 978-971-9640-30-1
the Youth and Beauty Brigade, 2014
P250 retail price
P220 when discounted
At this historical moment when the issue of how to respond to suffering is so fraught as to leave us speechless,
the poems of Conchitina Cruz have found a way to speak. Here in this starkly beautiful volume, she has
discovered a language sufficient to the terrors and the joys of the contemporary. The highest praise that can
be given to any work of literature and Dark Hours is most surely literature is that it is contemporary.
Dark Hours is not nostalgic for a lost and idealized past nor a distant and idealized future but is embedded
in the now: reporting it, transforming it. This is a very remarkable book.
Lynn Emanuel, from her blurb for the 2005 edition

Resources
The Re/Construction of Social Space in Conchitina Cruzs Poetry Collection Dark Hours, by Francisco
Guevara (Philippine Studies: Have We Gone Beyond St Louis? Priscelina Patoja-Legasto, ed., University of the
Philippines Press, 2008)
The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English, edited by Rajeev S. Patke and Philip
Holden (Routledge, 2009)

Conchitina Cruz teaches literature and creative writing at the University of the Philippines in Diliman. She
helps run the Youth & Beauty Brigade, a small press, as well as the semiannual small press expo Better Living
Through Xeroxography (BLTX). She is a PhD student in English at State University of New York (SUNY) Albany.
Dark Hours won the National Book Award in 2006.

Other books by Conchitina Cruz

Disappear
elsewhere held and lingered
A catalogue of clothes for sale from the closet of Christine Abellaperpetual student, ukay fan, and
compulsive traveler (with Adam David and Delilah Aguilar)
Two or Three Things about Desire

DARK HOURS

CONCHITINA CRUZ

Dear City,
Permit us to refresh your memory: what comes from heaven is always a blessing, the enemy is not
rain. Rain is the subject of prayer, the kind gesture of saints. Dear City, explain your irreverence: in
you, rain is a visitor with nowhere to go. Where is the ground that knows only the love of water?
Where are the passageways to your heart? Pity the water that stays and rises on the streets, pity
the water that floods into houses, so dark and filthy and heavy with rats and dead leaves and
plastic. How ashamed water is to be what you have made it. What have you done to its beauty, its
graceful body in pictures of oceans, its clear face in a glass? We walk home in the flood and cannot
see our feet. We forget to thank the gods for their kindness. We look for someone to blame and
turn to you, wretched city, because we are men and women of honor, we feed our children three
meals a day, we never miss an election. The only explanation is you, dear city. This is the end of our
discussion. There is no other culprit.

Move your hand over your body

Make the sign of the cross. What do you see? the nun says. A naked woman, a torch, a skull. Black
cloth. What do you see? A naked statue in hiding. I see nothing, you say.
Under the sheet is a body washed up a shore. Under the sheet is a face. Make the sign of the cross.
Sign the form and tear along the dotted line, carefully. The moral of the story is forgiveness, but
you ask, are there any other options?
Make the sign of the cross. Carry a knife in your purse despite the statistics: the weapon you own
may very well be used to kill you. Walk into the confessional, properly armed. The wooden saints
watch over you, their faces trapped in expressions of pity.
In the beginning, you are six years old. Move your hand over your body, make the sign of the cross.
Not with your left hand, the nun says.

What is it about tenderness

Next to herself, the body was all that mattered to her. It was the opposite of her greatest fear:
the city where streets sprouted overnight like weeds and snaked their way into each others
aimlessness. She closed her eyes and there it was, plowing into her dreams like a battered train,
searing its name, a dirty word, on her skin. Peopled to the brim and heavy with smog, in the city
there were no stars to lend order to the nameless nights, no traffic lights to follow, no lamps to
keep the street signs in sight.
The body was a different matter. She drew her scalpel across its skin like a lover tracing the distance
from this city to a beloveds across a map. She undressed it to the bone, prowling the alleys of its
nerves and vessels with the certainty of a frequent visitor. She uttered the names of its smallest
parts, the words sliding off her tongue.
A month, a year. How could naming keep the landscape the same?
Another siren howled on an empty street. She looked up, the city moving into her eyes as she
brushed the maggots off the body with the back of her gloved hand.

Geography Lesson
Inside the story is a garden with a pear tree, the view of a house with a staircase and mahogany
desks. Inside the house is a woman with her back against the windows, her body bent over her
child inside a crib, her body leaning against a table as she fixes the fruit in a bowl.
From the back of the room, somebody mentions foreshadowing, somebody makes distinctions
between image and symbol. The board is filled with words.
Inside the story is a dinner party the woman hosts, the idle talk of guests, the moment her husband
leans toward the body of another woman. She watches her husband and his small gesture, the
drawing room unable to contain her sudden knowledge. Inside the story, the woman turns away
from the climax, turns to the windows and the pear tree outside, the symbol of her life, the tree in
full bloom, the tree caught in shadows.
We talk about the tragedy of false notions, the link between discovery and despair, the joy of
understatement. When there is a knock on the door, a request to take a minute of our time, I say
sure. We are inside the story, and to the students outside, I say, sure, come on in.
What they pass around is a can, a sheet of paper, a request for loose change and volunteers to
dig for bodies. A few miles away, the residents of a dumpsite are dead, their bodies buried in an
avalanche of trash. Inside the story, the woman cries, what will happen to me now?
On the first day, the dying tried to raise their voices above the weight of their own tin roofs. The
digging was slow, the voices stopped. Inside the story, the woman fixes fruit in a bowlapples,
oranges, and grapes. She arranges and rearranges the fruit, draping the grapes on the rim, balancing
the oranges on apples.

The relatives need bodies for a proper burial. The can grows heavy. The students pause carefully
upon the sheet, and the others say think about it, we have a booth on the third floor, you dont
have to sign up now. Inside the story there is a woman, a house, a man, a pear tree. Inside the story
is a house, a bowl full of fruit. Some students are braver than others. They write their names down.
The woman leans the sadness of her body against the window, tries to look beyond the pear tree.
Inside the story, she sees nothing but darkness. She is ungrateful for the luxury of despair.

Smile
The man who thinks he is God likes to say I forgive you. Because they are obliged to be kind,
the nurses ignore him as he raises his right hand to bless them. While they change the sheets,
he forgives the world beyond his window, the trees, the parked cars, the janitor sweeping the
cigarette stubs off the sidewalk. I forgive you. I forgive you. The nurses lead him to bed, then leave.
They cannot stand his eyes, full of pity and condescension.
To the doctor, he says nothing. He thinks she is the Virgin Mary, and even God is in awe of The One
Without Sin. She approaches his body with the method of a mechanic. She listens to his heart,
his pulse, his lungs, inspects his ears, checks his reflexes. In a few minutes, she will be out of this
hospital, in her parked car, off to a date with the man she believes she will marry.
When the patient catches her eye, the doctor is somewhere else, in bed, holding the blanket close
to her body as her future husband holds a camera above her. Smile, he says, and she does. The
man who thinks he is God returns the smile of the woman before him, the Virgin Mother, and the
room is flooded with the radiance of the moment, a man and a woman in the middle of a sweet
misunderstanding.

I must say this about the city

The floor is my only friend I press my ear against the wood I put my body to sleep in a
corner hush I say to the floor but it has no control over its utterances it cannot keep
the citys secrets to itself I hear the coming and going of rain the swagger of trucks
taking pigs to a slaughterhouse the heels of women tapping on a stage footsteps
on their way somewhere please let me listen only to the dance of fingers
on a typewriter the stammering pulse lone comfort of the wrist the alphabet falling
like seeds the white page blooming but the floor cannot make concessions it tells me
everything all at once without running out of breath I am all alone the room is bare and
like a god grown weary the tree outside the window lays its shadow on the floor beside me

Tremble
The boys in her room are hiding in the same places. Who can explain their thrill in finding and
being found? One always takes the closet, the other the hollow under her bed. One, two, three,
the smaller one counts, and by ten, she is lost in the mystery shes reading, her favorite detective
breaking a code, on the verge of understanding
She turns the page. Downstairs, their mother is turning over another omelette in the pan. Milk,
detergent, soy sauce, she recites, in the same tone she will use later to say wash your hands, finish
your food, take your vitamins. She traces her mothers voice in the lines of the story she hasnt
finished but knows very well, the detective about to be caught in the act of deciphering, able to
escape with the answers in the end. Her brothers touch base, another game ends and begins,
nothing ever lost in the predictable plot. She marks the page with a pamphlet given in school, the
story of her body told in a diagram, the way to plot her own cycle taught in five steps.
This is the beauty of the declarative, like gravity, like the roses on the curtains, always abloom. Its
as easy as one, two, three, her smaller brother counts, the hollow under her bed shuddering with
contained laughter. Ten! he shouts, naming the last number before something explodes, something
is thrown out of orbit.

The Gist of It
If you remove the placemats and paper plates, the haggard flowers, the teacup with an image of a
woman in spring, spilled wine, the newspaper, and a ponderous pen, you will find it, the round face
of the table, placid and certain, ready to bask in the morning sun.
The table knows only joy once uncovered beneath so many objects of no consequence. Despite the
lost time, you have found it, and this in itself is a happy ending. Bless the table with the mist of the
right wood polish, let its face revel in the sweet clarity of natural light.
Think of the table in your time of darkness: on your knees with tears in your eyes, searching for the
familiar face, digging with your bare hands into the rubble.