Hailing from the southern Philippines, Alton Melvar M. Dapanas is a poet, essayist, and translator. M of the Southern Downpours (2024) is their third book and second collection of prose poems. It follows closely in the footsteps of In the Name of the Body: Lyric Essays (2023) and Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (2021).  It is a slim collection, consisting of 60 pages and 19 poems. Dapanas evocatively explores queerness against the backdrop of southern Philippine cityscapes, amplifying the dailiness of queer lives, while highlighting how people live, love, and long in the city.  Dapanas prefaces M of the Southern Downpours with a short essay on the prose poem as a form and muses on its characteristics and history. Both the subject of the essay and its title, “‘Poetry Beyond Verse’: Ruminations on the Prose Poem,” take from a 2010 lecture by Charles Simic (“Essay on the…

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