Spanning two decades, the poems in Tender Machines are set against the backdrop of changing landscapes—post 9-11 Manhattan, Manila, northern Mohave desert—as J. Mae Barizo considers love and disaster, its impetus and aftermath. Punctuated by contrapuntal precision, Barizo’s lyrics swing between the domestic and the surreal, charting the city, motherhood, and an immigrant family’s haunted inheritance. Through sonnets, lush minimalism and other formally-restless configurations, she explores the subtleties of longing and colonial memory, and the emotional topographies that evolve. 

With Tender Machines, Barizo establishes herself as a transcriber of desire, a resilient witness to the risks and losses it entails. Mapping the lives of women and the bodies they inhabit, poems such as “Small Essays on Disappearance,”―which channel the reverberations of motherhood and 9-11―collide with aubades in a ruined city: “buying food at the bodegas…nectarines and skin-tight plums.” The poems in Tender Machines live in the space between the public and the private, braiding an intimate narrative. In this unflinching work, music and mothering become transformative, kaleidoscopic lenses through which to contemplate disasters both global and personal. This necessary collection is a moving testimony to intergenerational ties and the histories that bind us, with all their losses, departures and wonders.

Praise for TENDER MACHINES:

In Tender Machines, intimacy becomes a kind of astonishment. The poems dance between innocence and experience as Barizo takes on the archetypes of Maiden and Mother, their freedoms and constraints. Staged between 9-11 and our current pandemic-infused apocalypse, familiar landscapes of Manhattan turn mythical as our Poet drifts, following where desire leads. The questioning of youth traverses into the erotics of post-Motherhood, forty the boundary line the poet crosses and recrosses, back and forth across a lyrical divide. Like our tender Penelope with her many suitors waiting for Odysseus to come home, Barizo contemplates old loves, pulling out all her stitches as she goes. —TIMOTHY LIU

J. Mae Barizo is a poet of uncommon grace. The poems in Tender Machines are unafraid of pain; they herald the mothers and take stock of the colonizers. These poems are a singing gift. — SARAH RUHL

J. Mae Barizo's Tender Machines is a sinuous wonder that explores the poles of revelation and disappearance. It is a meditation on tenderness, yes, and gives haunting new language to the in-betweens of motherhood, love, anguish, and empire. With music and lyricism as twin pillars, Tender Machines is a breathtaking second collection by a masterful poet. — RIO CORTEZ