Bea Bolongaita
Filipina American Poet
Debut Chapbook
The Tomato Woman
A “powerful collection” (Adam Clay) of poems from “a voice that demands engagement and attention with each vulnerable confession” (K.E. Ogden), Bea Bolongaita’s debut chapbook The Tomato Woman rewrites a traditional Midwestern coming-of-age story within the context of Filipina American identity. In conversation with Phoebe Bridgers’ melancholic lyricism and the love poetry of Ada Limón, Bolongaita brings together academic writing, colloquial speech, talk-backs to colonial anthropologists, and uncanny images of nature and adolescence to traverse the boundaries between history and love, motherhood and daughterhood, sobriety and intoxication, comedy and tragedy, and violence and intimacy, creating a new understanding of growing up and girlhood.
Order Now
Bea Bolongaita's powerful collection...captures fleeting moments with certainty and precision.
—Adam Clay
author of To Make Room for the Sea & editor-in-chief of The Mississippi Review
Praise For
The Tomato Woman
There is a tender ache in these pages, an ache born between knowing who you are and who you can become.
—Ruth Awad
author of Set Music to a Wildfire
A resplendent chapbook of poems that powerfully writes the body...
—Michael Leong
author of Who Unfolded My Origami Brain?
Are you a book reviewer?
The Adroit Journal is currently soliciting book reviews for The Tomato Woman. Click below for more information!
About Bea Bolongaita
Bea Bolongaita is a Filipina American poet from Dublin, OH. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Whale Road Review, Good River Review, Rogue Agent Journal, PCC Inscape, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry chapbook, The Tomato Woman (Sunset Press, May 2023), is currently available for purchase.