“There is something of Hughes here in following fragments, punctuation and the perceptive alignments of words which continually displace experience and our experience of language as it is thrown at or thrown out of circulation (or owned parenthetically). In a world drowning in knowledge and instant troubleshooting, Santos intelligently sets up the game of facts to win us over with a poetry that is a play of memes.”
—Paolo Manalo
Palanca Award-winning author of “Jolography”
“It’s not so hard to quickly label Santos’ poems as intimidating and cerebral, both for their visual flow on the page and—for readers who are often spoiled by a demand for immediate meaningfulness—their seeming inaccessibility. But the patient reader should be rewarded generously by this brilliant and meditative collection, if not by its sharp twists, turns, and dream systems, then by its kept promise of clarity. One grows into ‘Vocalese’ when one considers that the poems here are mostly concerned with the movement of language in the mind, and how our mental voices subsequently seek to utter these words.”
—Joel Toledo,
Winner for Poetry, 2006 Bridport Prize
