"'I am not your ethnic spectacle, ' declares Reyes in her powerful fifth collection. 'I write whether or not you invite my words.' Reyes fuses elegy, psalm, prayer, and the language of protest as a challenge to hegemonic, patriarchal, and colonialist narrative-making. Moving among English, Spanish, and Tagalog, Reyes chronicles the ways legal and judicial systems fail to protect Filipina women such as Mary Jane Veloso, who sits on death row in Indonesia, and Jennifer Laude, a trans woman murdered by a U.S. Marine stationed in the Philippines. She boldly exposes and documents violence against Pinay women while also embracing a liminal, transitory, trilingual identity: 'This lyric-making me, now a dazzling we.' Reyes writes with conviction about the various ways imperialism transforms women into 'capital, collateral, damaged soul.' However, the women that appear throughout the book are not merely victims; in Reyes's radical cosmology, these women-these daughters--are rebels, saints, revolutionaries, and torchbearers, 'sharp-tongued, willful.' This book is a call to arms against oppressive languages, systems, and traditions, all that 'strips us of our kick and grit.' In choosing to be ethical, and by refusing to submit to oppression, Reyes writes, 'We rise/ And in writing, we restore our lives.'"--Publishers Weekly, starred review

"San Francisco-based, James Laughlin Award-winning poet Reyes uses incantatory language to speak to Filipina girls and women, and her words will resonate with many, many readers. 'Daughters, our world is beyond unkind' opens an early poem; the collection as a whole then details the arduous female condition ('We are fed up being groped, being entered, being punished, being/ trashed. We are nobody's fucking things'), then strikes back sharply ('Why does my outrage inconvenience you?'), and advises ('let us create a language so that we know ourselves'). Individual poems apostrophize Filipinas like the murdered transgender Jennifer Laude. Infused with Spanish and Tagalog, Reyes's beautiful, angry verse shines throughout. For a wide range of readers."--Library Journal, starred review

"Language is fraught for Reyes, and her poetry crackles with her attempts at breaking out from the binds of colonialism, gender, and history. ... The language Reyes creates is one that brings together anti-colonial and anti-capitalist feminist thought and Catholic forms. There are psalms, prayers, and gospels written to and for Filipino women."--Ploughshares

"I feel like Reyes has found yet another gear in Invocation to Daughters. While it is still built on that same tension, where the beauty of expression crashes against the brutality of the world as it is (especially for women, especially for people of color) I find it here integrated and crystallized so deeply it awes me. Maybe I'm only noticing her maturity in a way, but it's sure not maturity in the sense of softness or acceptance: these poems are fire. Eternal fire, really, but also a highly specific and located fire: these are Filipino poems, periodically breaking into Tagalog, into Spanish, very much located in San Francisco, and very much everywhere too. It's a mystery to me how they can be so universal yet so immediately topical--so much so it seems impossible they were written before all the #metoo headlines, but that just shows again how sexual harassment and police shootings and grief and anger sure didn't start this month. Or as Reyes puts it: 'You walk hand-in-hand with your damage, into the world.' She also writes 'Fuck your fences and your applause' but I'm going to applaud anyway--this book is the news for real."--Small Press Distribution

"The directness of these [poems] feel to me very much in tune with the moment we're living in, where women in particular, le