











How to Migrate Ghosts - Jaiden Geolingo
“this country
is an open jaw; once, I gaped my throat so open"
- Filipino-American Open Letter
Addressed to the mother, the father, the land of his birth, and his people, Jaiden Geolingo's How to Migrate Ghosts holds the unsteady thread of becoming, belonging, at both fraying ends. Two feet in the US and his heart left behind him, Geolingo serves as both anchor and bridge. Landlocked, the Pinoy yearns for monsoon, for ocean; receding, returning, the persistence of blood. Geolingo writes into this movement, this intrinsic push/pull. 'Ars Poetica' implores, "Son, write something about burning," and, parched and pleading, he picks up his pen.
Release Date: August 28, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-964932-20-0
32 pages
Advance praise for How to Migrate Ghosts
What does it mean to survive your history? Here, Geolingo’s speakers practice an original religion created from the self and meant for respite: a religion of feeling and grievance. Through dexterous and expansive verses, they contemplate national identity by embedding it within landscapes and their climes. “Once, I bowed so far down and saw my future,” Geolingo writes. That future is still “repenting with a landlocked mouth.” That future is deviancy. How haunting. How alive.
Evan Wang, 9th National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States
Jaiden Geolingo maps the distances between homeland and diaspora, elegy and reinvention, selfhood and myth in this luminous debut. These poems are thick, humid with memory— each vignette is swaddled in adobo steam, Manila floodwater, and prayers to vanished ancestors. Through this rupturing voice, Geolingo crafts a poetics of migration: the ghosts in these pages are remembered and remade, and to read them is to step into the liminal, to speak to the dead, and to listen for their reply.- Wenshu Wang, National YoungArts Winner With Distinction in Poetry
Launched into pages of ampersands, the grit of sugar, and tone deftly wound, Geolingo crafts a world that is uniquely immersive. “Tonight, it is a reverse-Pangea :all continents coalescing,” Geolingo writes in “Elegy In Farmer’s Market.” Each part of How to Migrate Ghosts does the same. This book, beyond all its profound reflections on culture, America, and boyhood, is a testament to how language can directly touch the human heart. There is no poem that does not shine, each word poised to reflect new emotion onto the reader.Ivi Hua, author of Body, Dissected
In How to Migrate Ghosts, Jaiden Geolingo writes like someone whose mouth has just remembered it was an altar. These poems bruise and sing in the same breath, reckoning with diaspora not as geography but as haunt: a syllable that fractures when said too loud, a grandmother’s rosary still warm with prayer, a bottle of Mang Tomas glinting like gospel in a fluorescent aisle. With wild syntax and incantatory wit, Geolingo retools elegy for the immigrant body—tagged by TSA, tongueless in both English and mother tongue, but defiant enough to shapeshift. His poems do not mourn so much as transfigure—barber clippers become sacraments, pork adobo a communion, Christmas a lucid dream full of gingerbread teeth and immigrant grief. This is a debut that refuses clean severance: from love, from gentleness, from home. It’s radiant with refusal, generous in its hunger, and holy in the way only the irreverent can be. A poet to watch, pray to, and fear a little.Rishi Janakiraman, North Carolina Youth Poet Laureate
“this country
is an open jaw; once, I gaped my throat so open"
- Filipino-American Open Letter
Addressed to the mother, the father, the land of his birth, and his people, Jaiden Geolingo's How to Migrate Ghosts holds the unsteady thread of becoming, belonging, at both fraying ends. Two feet in the US and his heart left behind him, Geolingo serves as both anchor and bridge. Landlocked, the Pinoy yearns for monsoon, for ocean; receding, returning, the persistence of blood. Geolingo writes into this movement, this intrinsic push/pull. 'Ars Poetica' implores, "Son, write something about burning," and, parched and pleading, he picks up his pen.
Release Date: August 28, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-964932-20-0
32 pages
Advance praise for How to Migrate Ghosts
What does it mean to survive your history? Here, Geolingo’s speakers practice an original religion created from the self and meant for respite: a religion of feeling and grievance. Through dexterous and expansive verses, they contemplate national identity by embedding it within landscapes and their climes. “Once, I bowed so far down and saw my future,” Geolingo writes. That future is still “repenting with a landlocked mouth.” That future is deviancy. How haunting. How alive.
Evan Wang, 9th National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States
Jaiden Geolingo maps the distances between homeland and diaspora, elegy and reinvention, selfhood and myth in this luminous debut. These poems are thick, humid with memory— each vignette is swaddled in adobo steam, Manila floodwater, and prayers to vanished ancestors. Through this rupturing voice, Geolingo crafts a poetics of migration: the ghosts in these pages are remembered and remade, and to read them is to step into the liminal, to speak to the dead, and to listen for their reply.- Wenshu Wang, National YoungArts Winner With Distinction in Poetry
Launched into pages of ampersands, the grit of sugar, and tone deftly wound, Geolingo crafts a world that is uniquely immersive. “Tonight, it is a reverse-Pangea :all continents coalescing,” Geolingo writes in “Elegy In Farmer’s Market.” Each part of How to Migrate Ghosts does the same. This book, beyond all its profound reflections on culture, America, and boyhood, is a testament to how language can directly touch the human heart. There is no poem that does not shine, each word poised to reflect new emotion onto the reader.Ivi Hua, author of Body, Dissected
In How to Migrate Ghosts, Jaiden Geolingo writes like someone whose mouth has just remembered it was an altar. These poems bruise and sing in the same breath, reckoning with diaspora not as geography but as haunt: a syllable that fractures when said too loud, a grandmother’s rosary still warm with prayer, a bottle of Mang Tomas glinting like gospel in a fluorescent aisle. With wild syntax and incantatory wit, Geolingo retools elegy for the immigrant body—tagged by TSA, tongueless in both English and mother tongue, but defiant enough to shapeshift. His poems do not mourn so much as transfigure—barber clippers become sacraments, pork adobo a communion, Christmas a lucid dream full of gingerbread teeth and immigrant grief. This is a debut that refuses clean severance: from love, from gentleness, from home. It’s radiant with refusal, generous in its hunger, and holy in the way only the irreverent can be. A poet to watch, pray to, and fear a little.Rishi Janakiraman, North Carolina Youth Poet Laureate