The Experiment of the Tropics: Poems, Lawrence Lacambra Ypil
$16.00
Lawrence Lacambra Ypil’s The Experiment of the Tropics blends history, photography, and lyric imagination to explore early-twentieth-century Philippines under American colonialism. A Lambda Literary Award finalist and Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize co-winner, the collection meditates on longing, desire, and the shimmering details captured in archival images. Spare, musical, and deeply evocative, Ypil’s poems uncover the city—both real and imagined—hidden within the frames of the past.
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Description
The Experiment of the Tropics: Poems
Paperback – April 5, 2019
by Lawrence Lacambra Ypil (Author)
A finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards and co-winner of the inaugural Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize, The Experiment of the Tropics is a spellbinding exploration of history, photography, queerness, and the luminous fragments that shape a place and its memory. Named one of The Millions’ must-read poetry books of April 2019, Lawrence Lacambra Ypil’s collection returns to the early-twentieth-century Philippines under American colonial rule and poses a deceptively simple question: How does one look at the past?
Ypil answers through a vibrant fusion of anthropology and lyricism, excavating both the physical and imagined city that emerges from archival photographs. The poems conjure a landscape alive with shimmer and contradiction—petal and porch, coral and brass, a river-refrigerator where women see themselves reflected in glossy magazine pages and men lean against old walls, calling the reader closer. With spare, musical lines, Ypil animates moments both intimate and historical, revealing how desire, beauty, violence, and erasure linger in the surfaces and shadows of colonized spaces.
At once erotic, meditative, and incisive, The Experiment of the Tropics is a poetic inquiry into longing—longing for a city, for history, for bodies touched by both oppression and brilliance. Ypil’s work illuminates the redemptive possibilities of looking back, even when the past resists coherence. In these pages, photography becomes an aperture into lost worlds, and poetry becomes the lens through which those worlds flare into life again.
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