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Patria Rivera is a Filipino-Canadian poet, writer and editor. Rivera’s first poetry collection, Puti/White, was released by Frontenac House Press in 2005 and was a finalist for the Canadian Trillium Book Award for Poetry. In 2007, she was a co-recipient of the Filipino Global Book Award for Poetry. She has published three other poetry collections: The Bride Anthology, BE, and The Time Between. Rivera received a fellowship to the Hawthornden Castle International Writers Residency in Midlothian, Scotland, as well as fellowships from the Writers’ Union of Canada, the Banff Centre for the Arts Electronic Writing Program, and the Nieman Center for Journalism at Harvard University. A book she co-edited, Magdaragat: An Anthology of Filipino-Canadian Writing, was released by Cormorant Books in 2023.

Early life and education

Patria Rivera was born in Quezon City, Philippines, where her parents settled after living in her father’s hometown in Gapan, Nueva Ecija where her father served as town mayor. Her father, Jose R. Cabatuando Sr. (d. 1985), a lawyer and bar topnotcher, was appointed a judge of the Court of Agrarian Relations in the Philippine judiciary in the mid-1950s. Her mother, Petra Padilla Abes (d. 1985), from the Padilla family in Penaranda, Nueva Ecija, was a homemaker who looked after her eight children and managed the household. Rivera attended public schools in the Sta. Mesa Heights district in Quezon City: Ramon Magsaysay Elementary School and E. Rodriguez Jr. High School. In high school, Rivera won the city-wide Pedro Tuazon Essay Contest and edited the school's newspaper, The Heights. She graduated valedictorian of her high school.

After graduating from high school, Rivera studied Journalism at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City. She also completed the program in development economics at the School of Economics, University of the Philippines. While at university, Rivera wrote for The Philippine Collegian and edited the U. P. Woman’s Club newsletter, The Quill. During summers she apprenticed at The Weekly Graphic magazine. She also won fellowships to U.P. Writers’ Workshop as well as the Silliman University (Dumaguete) Writers’ Workshop. While she was still a sophomore at university, Prof. N.V.M. Gonzales, one of her mentors, picked two of her short stories for publication in The Weekly Nation, where he was literary editor.

In the ensuing years of martial law and the still-uncertain times of the post-EDSA years, Rivera and her husband moved to Canada in search of a more secure place to raise their young children.

Career

Rivera received the Canadian Trillium Book Award for Poetry for her debut poetry collection, Puti/White. Puti/White, was published by Frontenac House Press in 2005. In a review of Puti/White, The Globe and Mail said Rivera’s journalistic background imparts candor to her poetry: “She chronicles the exile's condition and the conditions leading to exile, without guile, nostalgia or pity. Right from the bilingual title of Rivera's fine collection, which was justly a finalist for this year's Trillium Prize in poetry, oppositions exist in unquestioned juxtaposition: home with exile, belonging with exclusion, torture with moments of breathtaking and breath-giving grace.”

“Rivera writes her homeland as normal—not remembered but woven into the present. The first section shows us her childhood in the Philippines: The reader is offered "persimmons/ of the orangest hue," and meets an aunt "hatching mangoes." But Rivera avoids false exoticism, choosing deliberately unusual turns of phrase and leaving Spanish and Filipino words unitalicized, making her childhood home seem quotidian rather than sepia-tinted.

“…This was my home, Rivera writes in the first section; this was where we took it, the second echoes. The Geography Outside scoops out that hungry marrow and licks it off its fingers as emigration gouges the patria, which was home despite the daily tragedies of stillbirths and wars. Rivera recounts departures, compresses family histories and gnashes at exile. Although, ‘Somehow the words do not seem to match/ the nettles that lacerate and I roil inside,’ the poems are tenacious and tender, hell-bent on relearning, rebuilding—the opposite of destruction.”

In another review by Canadian Literature, the reviewer notes:

“In the loping and stretch of her lines, Rivera teaches the reader the inadequacy of the terms available in any one language system, and hints at the subtle gradations of difference between nada and nothing, between Puti and White. But even when the glossary is not needed, the Rivera poem typically negotiates the dynamics of translation-between geographies of persimmon and frangipani and ‘the movements / of bear, deer, lynx, squirrel, and porcupine;’ between dreams of ‘bazookas and bayonets’ and an elusive ‘world bathed in the soft light of snowdrifts.’ Rivera is constantly translating the pain of having ‘once been vulnerable,’ remembering and reliving. She is speaking in one language and thinking in another: ‘Somehow the words do not seem to match / the nettles that lacerate and I roil inside / because I cannot put words to my anger.’”

Subsequently, Rivera has also published The Bride Anthology (Frontenac House Media, 2007), BE, (Signature Editions, Winnipeg, Manitoba, 2011), and The Time Between (Signature Editions, Winnipeg, Manitoba, 2018).

The Bride Anthology is more like a mother’s wishes for her daughters, according to Rivera in an interview with The Asian Canadian Observer. “These are imagined stories of getting married. It’s the most flippant of all my books. It’s dedicated to my four daughters. I thought I should leave a legacy to them about what it is to find love, to lose love, to get married, to get unmarried.”

In BE, Rivera goes back to serious poetry. “It’s about becoming who you are as a person; it’s also a woman’s struggle to become her own in the world.”

The Time Between, on the other hand, is a collection of “poems that burrow deep inside rusty rooms, the brachiated hearts of sleepless women, the anguish pounding the fault lines of monsoons and long rains, the sheets of ancient wound and anger, the littered and abandoned alleyways of shell-shocked hamlets and towns.”

The poet describes this collection as her war-story period: “I was thinking of all the wars in the world … what people are doing about it, the suffering it has caused to people.”

As well, Rivera has also co-authored two chapbooks, Weathering: An Exchange of Poems (Silver Maple Press, 2008) and Sixth from the Sixth (2001).

In Fall, 2023, Magdaragat: An Anthology of Filipino-Canadian Writing, a book Rivera co-edited, was released by Cormorant Books.

Rivera’s poetry is featured in Oxford University Press’s Perspectives in Ideology, and in Elana Wolff's Implicate me: short essays on reading contemporary poems. Her poems have also been published in the Literary Review of Canada, Fireweed, The League of Canadian Poets Online and other Canadian and international publications. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Positively Filipino and The Philippine Daily Inquirer-U.S.A. (INQUIRER.net | Philippine news for Filipinos).

In 1997 Rivera won an honorable mention in the ARC Poetry Magazine Second Annual Poem of the Year Contest for her poem, “Living on the borders, dying in the margins.”

In 2005 her poem, “Rare species,” was selected as the second-prize winner in the Eric Hill Award of Poetic Excellence competition held by QWERTY, a literary journal published by the English Department of the University of New Brunswick.

Personal life

As of 2023, Rivera resides in Toronto, Ontario, with her family. When asked who her favorite authors are, Rivera said she was inspired by the proletarian works of Filipino poet and novelist Amado V. Hernandez and others who have written about the socio-economic conditions in the Philippines, among them poet Emmanuel Lacaba and screenwriter and fictionist Ricky Lee. Canadian poets include Helen Humphreys, Don Domanski, David Donnell, Michael Redhill, Ken Babstock and Molly Peacock. “They have mentored and encouraged me at different periods of my poetry writing life.” And among International poets: Pablo Neruda, Anna Akhmatova, and Marina Tsvetaeva. She was also an early follower of Alice Munro, whose stories she read even while still living in Metro Manila.

Awards and honors

• 2006: Finalist, Canadian Trillium Book Award for Poetry, Ontario, Canada
• 2007: Co-Recipient, Filipino Global Literary Award for Poetry for Puti/White http://www.philstar.com/arts-and-culture/30994/global-filipino-literary-awards-etc
• 2005: Second Prize, “Rare species,” Eric Hill Award of Poetic Excellence Competition, QWERTY (Literary Journal), English Department, University of New Brunswick.
• 1997: Honorable Mention, “Living on the borders, dying in the margins,” ARC Poetry Magazine Second Annual Poem of the Year Contest

Bibliography Books

• Magdaragat: An Anthology of Filipino-Canadian Writing, Co-Editor, with C.E. Gatchalian & Teodoro Alcuitas, Cormorant Books, 2023
• The Time Between, Signature Editions, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, 2018http://www.signature-editions.com/index.php/books/single_title/the_time_between
• BE, Signature Editions, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, 2011(http://www.signature-editions.com/index.php/books/authors/rivera_patria)
• The Bride Anthology, Frontenac House, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, 200 (https://www.frontenachouse.com/dd-product/the-bride-anthology/ )
• Puti/White, Frontenac House Calgary, Alberta, Canada, 2005 (https://www.frontenachouse.com/dd-product/putiwhite/)

Chapbooks

• Weathering: An Exchange of Poems (co-author), Silver Maple Press, 2008. Republished online in Poemeleon, May 2010 (http://www.poemeleon.org/sue-chenette-et-al)
• Six from the Sixth (co-author), Sixth Floor Press, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2001

Other publications

• “When pity plays the piano,” I Found It at the Movies, Ruth Roach Pierson, Ed., Guernica Editions, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2014
• Review, “Cold War: 1957,” Implicate me: short essays on reading contemporary poems, Elana Wolff, Guernica Press, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2010
• Poem, “Cold War, 1957,” Perspectives in Ideology Book Series, Oxford University Press, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2009
• Poem, “The Bride Muses the Might-Have-Beens,” Literary Review of Canada, March 2007
• Poem, “Rules of Engagement” Literary Review of Canada, March 2007
• Poems, “Three Poems,” Fireweed: A Feminist Quarterly of Writing, Politics, Art & Culture, Toronto, Ontario, 1997

References

1. “But a good year for poetry,” Katia Grubisic, The Globe and Mail, July 8, 2006.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/but-a-good-year-for-poetry/article18167028/

2. “AWARDS: PEABODY, IMPAC, GRIFFIN AND TRILLIUM,” The Globe and Mail, April 6, 2006.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/awards-peabody-impac-griffin-and-trillium/article706036/

3. “REVIEW OF PUTI/WHITE, 2007: Idea and Parody,” Ricou, Laurie. Canadian Literature; Vancouver Issue 193, (Summer 2007): 178-181.

Copyright University of British Columbia Summer 2007.

https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/idea-parody/docview/218822460/se-2

4. “Inward and Outward: The Poetry of Patria Rivera,” Marites (Tess) Sison, Asian Canadian Observer, Feb 12, 2022.

https://asiancanadianobserver.substack.com/p/outward-and-inward-the-poetry-of?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=cta

5. PUTI/WHITE by Patria Rivera, Reme Grefalda, galatea resurrects, #3 (a poetry engagement), August 23, 2006.

http://galatearesurrection3.blogspot.com/

6. “Vancouver literary fest to feature Fil-Canadian writers,” Charmaine Y. Rodriguez, U.S.A. Inquirer, September 11, 2023.

https://usa.inquirer.net/136373/vancouver-literary-fest-to-feature-fil-canadian-writers

7. https://www.writersunion.ca/member/patria-rivera

8. https://library.torontomu.ca/asianheritage/authors/rivera/

9. https://privera1014.wixsite.com/patria-rivera-writer