Antiemetic for Homesickness

Romalyn Ante is a poet to fall in love with. A flower of both the Philippines and the Black Country, her vivid, sensual poems weave a fascinating and moving story of migration and loss, caring and tenderness

Liz Berry

What might it mean to survive the incandescent distances between here and all we’ve ever left behind—the languages, the myths, the keepsakes and names? How can we return to lost things and those who love us, relearn what draws away from memory? Romalyn Ante traces paths back through such questions with the grace of lancets, illuminating scars and landscapes, celebrating the "invisible…goddesses of caring and tending" in this brilliant collection. It is something of miracle to experience a debut that charts our "dislocated world" with such incisive generosity. I am beyond grateful for these poems—each one pulsing with "the rhythm of a shockable heart."

R.A. Villanueva

A poetry of rapturous images and riveting conscience

Tracy K. Smith

Captivating...playful...moving, witty and agile...These poems have a tended quality, as though Ante's kindness as a nurse extended to them. She is an unforced poet with a lightness of touch and fortitude, not neglecting to see her situation within a wider cultural and historical context

Kate Kelloway, Observer *Poetry Book of the Month*

Ante's poems are like embers, pared back to a slow-burning emotional core whose intensity she sustains elegantly throughout the collection

Stephanie Sy-Quia, Times Literary Supplement

Romalyn Ante's debut collection presents an important and magical display of culture and perspective. There is always that memory that pervades someone's mind of what it is to migrate from one's home to another place. How are the people back home? The people who were left behind, how are they? Have they changed? [Antiemetic for Homesickness] aims to tackle those questions with folklore and spirit and honor

Shaun Anto, Columbia Journal

Ante has an assured hand, with a mastery of form and freshness of vision... these are poems that pay testimony to Ante's deep sense of humanity, authenticity, and caring, together with a desire to make the best of what life brings

Mary Mulholland, The Alchemy Spoon

The 35 poems in this collection document stories of yearning as well as pluck and hard love... I'm rewarded with the privilege of witnessing how the poet-speaker's attention and empathy for others in the world continues to generously unfold

Luisa A. Igloria, RHINO

Ante writes with a voice that I can only imagine develops when the act of care is central to one's life. She minces no words. Antiemetic for Homesickness manages to stand so coherently as a collection on account of how the poems' polyphony of voices interact with one another. We are at the mercy of her retort to those who underestimate immigrant workers

Holly Loveday, Wild Court

Ante is an adept artist who can seamlessly internalise the external and externalise the internal... This collection is also a treatise on mothering, un-mothering, and more significantly, remothering. The book is dedicated to Ante's mother, whose presence in many forms is palpable and penetrating

Cuilin Sang, Poetry Birmingham

Poignant, beautiful, and meditative writing on movement - living in a foreign country, being away from one's family, speaking a language not quite your own... This is possibly the most beautiful thing I have read this year

Maria Lewandowska, The Poetry School *Poetry Books of the Year*

By turns playful and tender, offering a formally-various exploration of migration, community, and nursing... there is honesty, musicality, a powerful heart

Seán Hewitt, The Irish Times *Best Poetry Books of 2020*

The collection shines a welcome light on a too-often overlooked community, whose hard work and dedication to keeping the NHS afloat -- both before the pandemic and more so now -- puts this country enormously in debt

Stella Backhouse, Here Comes Everyone

[A] tour-de-force

Jhalak Prize