What Is Left of Wings, I Ask is a meditation on flight, loss, and what remains when both body and language are tested by distance. In this award-winning chapbook, Luisa A. Igloria—former Poet Laureate of Virginia and one of the most celebrated Filipino American poets of her generation—writes with luminous precision about migration, motherhood, memory, and the daily transformations of the self. Each poem moves between grounded domestic scenes and the metaphysical air of longing, tracing the fragile balance between what we hold and what slips away.
This limited-edition chapbook was designed and letterpress printed by Barbara Henry in collaboration with swamp press and hand-bound in a small run. The physical book mirrors the lyric delicacy of Igloria’s poems: tactile, quiet, and enduring. Printed on fine cotton rag paper, its deep letterpress impression gives the text a sculptural quality, inviting touch as much as reading. Its thread-sewn binding and soft deckle edges evoke the intimate, ephemeral nature of wings themselves—objects made to carry, to move, and ultimately, to let go.
In her introduction, Natasha Trethewey praises Igloria’s poems for their “clarity and grace,” observing that they reveal “the motion of a mind in wonder—attentive to the ordinary miracles that tether us to one another.” The result is a chapbook that feels both personal and mythic: a hand-held archive of resilience, written in a voice that refuses disappearance.
What Is Left of Wings, I Ask stands as both a literary and a craft object—an embodiment of CBA’s mission to unite poetic vision with the art of the book.