In The Highest Hiding Place, Ypil takes us to places in the self where words do not exist, where thoughts glimmer and perish before they could threaten one with their fangs and claws, where only things without names thrive in their tenuous luminosity, shades, auras, feelings, moods. Yet doubt not the reality of these secret places, they are an infinite dimension of the world we experience daily, sunlight in the garden, a family picnic, old photographs, the common places we take for granted that yields the poet's poetic world. These hiding places thrive in the spaces between words of a conversation between mother and son, between men and their lovers, between generations, as between son and father, children contemplating their "mother-as-child only as tall as lola's hips. / Her hair tied to strings. Her breasts flat / milkless yet. Her womb / full to its rim with possibility." Ypil's poetry invents a language that makes this secret world palpable and alive somehow without disturbing the ineffable quality of these experiences. Reading Ypil is meeting oneself in memory, that of the poet's and one's own, and in that encounter, affirm everything that one had gone through—pain, fear, lust, love, the interminable secrets that are always converging and fading, and converging in every moment of one's ordinary day, and even in one's dreams. And we find our own hiding place. —Merlie Alunan

Lawrence Lacambra Ypil's poetry has been included in national and international publications and he has received numerous awards including the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature ("The Highest Hiding Place," First Place, English Poetry Category, 2006), the Philippines Free Press Awards ("The Horde," 2001), and the Joseph Mulry Award for Literary Excellence (1999). Born and raised in Cebu, he currently teaches literature and creative writing at the Ateneo de Manila University, where he is completing an MA in Literary and Cultural Studies. He also keeps a column in Sun Star Weekend called "Dog-ears in the Wrong Notebook."

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