AGIMAT

'An alchemical wonder of a poet' Fiona Benson, author of Vertigo & Ghost 
 
'Vivid, lyrical, and always surprising . . . Both a balm and a call to action' Nathan Filer, author of The Shock of the Fall 
 
A sparkling new collection from Romalyn Ante, nurse and prizewinning poet, moving between the Philippines and Wolverhampton, myth and the grind of the present-day NHS. 
 
'this charms the buried light of stars – 
this deflects bullets – this unblooms a war – ' 
 
In some Filipino clans, parents pass down to each child an AGIMAT, an amulet, in the hope its magic will protect and empower them. At the dawn of the pandemic, the poet – a practising nurse in the NHS – is thrown onto the frontlines of the war against COVID-19. 
 
Past conflicts swim into the now. When she falls in love with a man of Japanese heritage, it forces a reckoning with her family’s suffering under Japan’s brutal wartime occupation of the Philippines. Elsewhere, we meet the irrepressible goddess Mebuyan, who, in Philippine myth, nurses the spirits of children in the underworld. Here, she watches over young people in crisis – a girl who can’t stop cutting herself, a teenager who has leapt from a railway viaduct. 
 
These are poems of strength and solace; they question what it means to fight, and what it takes to heal.

‘Ante is an alchemical wonder of a poet: unparalleled in her image-making, raw to both historical and contemporary damage and rich in cultures. Utterly original, AGIMAT is itself a talisman – a fiery binding of pain and a message of love to the wounded and lost. Keep these poems with you as I will – always’

‘With precision, deftness, and at times playfulness, AGIMAT weaves in mythical and modern imageries, the universal with the intimate. The result is a powerful and hopeful collection, filled with heart and beauty, that illuminates us to the many forms that caring and healing can take’

'Romalyn Ante's mesmeric new collection is deeply rooted in the dualities of life, cultural identity, and the profound interplay of personal and communal experience. Vivid, lyrical, and always surprising, it is a testament to those who navigate the complex legacies of history toward healing and resilience. It is both a balm and a call to action, reminding us of the transformative power of bearing witness.'

‘If translation is always physical, often joyous work – the act of carrying meaning across the chasms separating languages – then AGIMAT is about the daily embodied acts involved in this labour. To live in translation is to be estranged. Yet the joy of translation comes from this very estrangement. Romalyn Ante makes us feel this, as estrangement transforms into its own vibrant space of joy. Ante’s irrepressible inquiries into translation create a colourful linguistic sanctuary’

‘Romalyn Ante’s first collection introduced us to a voice both vibrant and thoughtful. This collection grows out from this - now coming with a feeling of added power and forcefulness. This is a special book - both urgent and beautiful'

[A] spellbinding meditation on love and loss… Her poems throb vigorously with life… in the hands of Romalyn Ante the human self far exceeds statistics and the subtotal of all its scars

Ante’s second collection is rooted in her experience as an NHS nurse during Covid. She is unflinching in detailing the physical and emotional exhaustion of that labour… what unites the poems is her simple, beautiful language, and an awareness of the difficulty of healing

this charms the buried light of stars – 
this deflects bullets – this unblooms a war – 
 
In some Filipino clans, parents pass down to each child an agimat, an amulet or charm, in the hope its magic will protect and empower them. In a world of daily pain and loss, Romalyn Ante’s second collection asks how do we keep safe what we hold most dear? At the dawn of the pandemic, the poet – a practising nurse in the NHS – is thrown onto the frontlines of the war against COVID-19, and finds herself questioning what it means to fight, and what it takes to heal. 
 
Past conflicts swim into the now: when the poet falls in love with a man of Japanese heritage, it forces a reckoning with her family’s suffering under Japan’s brutal wartime occupation of the Philippines. Elsewhere, we meet the irrepressible, many-breasted goddess Mebuyan, the poet’s alter ego. In Philippine myth, Mebuyan nurses the spirits of departed children in the underworld, but here she watches over young people in crisis – a girl who can’t stop cutting herself, a teenager who has leapt from a railway viaduct. These are poems of strength and solace – they quiver with heart, feeling a way toward hope.

Antiemetic for Homesickness

A brilliant addition to the Chatto poetry list: the first collection from a rising star, Romalyn Ante

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

The Irish Times *Best Poetry Books of 2020*

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

A poetry of rapturous images and riveting conscience

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

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.”

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

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

The Poetry School *Poetry Books of the Year*

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

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

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

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

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

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

*Longlisted for the Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize 2021* 
*Shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize 2021: A 'tour-de-force'* 
 
*An Irish Times and Poetry School Book of the Year 2020* 
 
'A day will come when you won't miss 
the country na nagluwal sa 'yo.' 
- 'Antiemetic for Homesickness' 
 
The poems in Romalyn Ante's luminous debut build a bridge between two worlds: journeying from the country 'na nagluwal sa 'yo' - that gave birth to you - to a new life in the United Kingdom. 
 
Steeped in the richness of Filipino folklore, and studded with Tagalog, these poems speak of the ache of assimilation and the complexities of belonging, telling the stories of generations of migrants who find exile through employment - through the voices of the mothers who leave and the children who are left behind. 
 
With dazzling formal dexterity and emotional resonance, this expansive debut offers a unique perspective on family, colonialism, homeland and heritage: from the countries we carry with us, to the places we call home. 
 
'Moving, witty and agile' Observer 
 
'By turns playful and tender, offering a formally-various exploration of migration, community, and nursing... there is honesty, musicality, a powerful heart' Irish Times

Romalyn Ante

‘The Left-Behind Child is a beautiful, hypnotic novel – positively capacious in its depth, its texture, and its heart’

Claire Lombardo, author of The Most Fun We Ever Had

‘Romalyn Ante’s debut is such an assured and visceral piece of writing, richly detailed, and captures brilliantly the complexity of a teenage girl’s feelings for her absent mother - that need to both curl up on her arms like a child and break free of her as if she were the enemy. I love those moments too when you get snapshots of Rosa’s UK life that allow you to read between the lines and see the painful truth about working as a nurse in a foreign country that Neneng (of course!) fails to understand'

'A lyrical and sensory coming of age story about loss and longing. Romalyn Ante’s debut novel is also a powerful exploration of the cost of caring both to nurses and those "Left Behind' "

Christie Watson, author of The Language of Kindness

'A beautifully crafted debut novel; a coming-of-age story that asks deep questions about loyalty and love, vocation and duty, and how we care for the people who care for us'

Gavin Francis, author of The Bridge Between Worlds

‘Showcases [a] unique poet’s eye ... Ante's story keeps up a giddy pace. Her narrative touch with a keen eye for telling detail ... heightens the reader’s senses. Moving, comic, full of imagination, The Left-Behind Child is a novel full of heart, which holds a mirror up to the myriad ways we make sense of ourselves … '

Fred d’Aguiar, author of Year of Plagues

‘I loved this story of a daughter negotiating the loss of her mother to a richer nation’s healthcare system, and discovering the passion that led her mother to become a nurse along the way. It is populated by beautifully drawn characters; big characters full of emotion, life and conflict. These characters grew so vivid as I read that, after only a few pages, I felt I was living alongside Neneng’s family, experiencing all that was changing during her mother’s long absence. There is sadness here, but hilarity too, and stoic bravado in the face of adversity and superstition. I love the way the colossal, moon-swallowing Bakunawa haunts Neneng’s imagination until she discovers the satisfaction to be found in caring. This is a gorgeously bright and colourful novel. A moving, complex and engaging coming of age story about what it is to be left behind when the breadwinner has to go and win the bread a long, long way from home.’ –

Kathryn Faulke, author of Every Kind of People

'Romalyn Ante writes about love in a way that feels both tender and unsettling at the same time. Her prose has this quiet, poetic quality that makes you sit with uncomfortable truths—that love can nourish you, but also leave deep, lasting wounds. Reading it, I found myself rethinking the idea of abandonment; it no longer felt like a simple act of leaving, but something shaped by necessity, sacrifice, and forces much bigger than any one person. The novel gently pushes you to reflect on what care really looks like, how forgiveness isn’t always straightforward, and how growing up in the absence of someone you love can shape you in ways you’re only beginning to understand. A powerful, nostalgic read. The kind of story that lingers - softly but persistently - long after you’ve turned the last page.'

Oliver Soriano, President of the Philippine Nursing Association UK and a Chief Nursing Officer (NHS)

'The Left-behind Child leaves me amazed at how Romalyn Ante, with crisp sentences that breathe life, weaves the story of Neneng. Fast-paced, unputdownable, the narrative flows with action, sapping the bane of too much description, giving life and roundness to the characters and a fresh green to the landscape of the past. This well-written novel will surely go the distance of time'

Simeon Dumdum Jr., multi-awardee of the Philippines' Palanca Memorial Award

'A beautiful, hypnotic novel – positively capacious in its depth, its texture, and its heart' CLAIRE LOMBARDO 
'Captures brilliantly the complexity of a teenage girl's feelings for her absent mother' RACHEL JOYCE 
 
A mother forced to leave her family. A daughter forced to reckon with what is left behind. 
 
Lipa, Philippines, 2001. Neneng is 11 when her mother, Rosa, leaves to work as a nurse overseas: abandoning Neneng to care for a distant father, unsettled relatives and rebellious siblings. Their home shatters, and Neneng finds herself facing womanhood alone. From that point on, she vows never to become a nurse, and never to trust her mother again. 
 
But Neneng is more like the strong-minded Rosa than she realises. As Neneng fights to survive and build a new life, the darknesses in the family’s past come to light, and the reasons why Rosa needed to leave become clearer. When a twist of fate brings a new mother figure into her orbit, Neneng will come to understand why the profession of nursing matters so deeply to Rosa and – when crisis strikes – what ‘care’ means to Neneng. 
 
Praise for Romalyn Ante: 
'Ante is ... unparalleled in her image-making' Fiona Benson 
'Spellbinding' Observer 
'Powerful and hopeful ... Filled with heart and beauty' Cecile Pin

Romalyn Ante

Praise for The Left-Behind Child

‘The Left-Behind Child is a beautiful, hypnotic novel – positively capacious in its depth, its texture, and its heart’

‘Romalyn Ante’s debut is such an assured and visceral piece of writing, richly detailed, and captures brilliantly the complexity of a teenage girl’s feelings for her absent mother - that need to both curl up ...

'A lyrical and sensory coming of age story about loss and longing. Romalyn Ante’s debut novel is also a powerful exploration of the cost of caring both to nurses and those "Left Behind' "

‘The Left-Behind Child is a beautiful, hypnotic novel – positively capacious in its depth, its texture, and its heart’

‘Romalyn Ante’s debut is such an assured and visceral piece of writing, richly detailed, and captures brilliantly the complexity of a teenage girl’s feelings for her absent mother - that need to both curl up ...

'A lyrical and sensory coming of age story about loss and longing. Romalyn Ante’s debut novel is also a powerful exploration of the cost of caring both to nurses and those "Left Behind' "

‘The Left-Behind Child is a beautiful, hypnotic novel – positively capacious in its depth, its texture, and its heart’

‘Romalyn Ante’s debut is such an assured and visceral piece of writing, richly detailed, and captures brilliantly the complexity of a teenage girl’s feelings for her absent mother - that need to both curl up ...

'A lyrical and sensory coming of age story about loss and longing. Romalyn Ante’s debut novel is also a powerful exploration of the cost of caring both to nurses and those "Left Behind' "

Books by Romalyn Ante

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter