Book Review: Past & Parallel Lives by Kaya Ortiz

Kaya Ortiz’s debut poetry collection, Past & Parallel Lives, published by UWA Publishing, is an ouroboros. As the metaphorical snake consumes itself, it is not diminished or lost, but reborn, growing from the trauma it swallows. Winner of the 2024 Dorothy Hewett Award, Past & Parallel Lives is a revolutionary text that reorients how queer, displaced stories are told. Ortiz embraces shame as a transformative emotion, refusing to hide in its shadow. 

The collection is Ortiz’s poetic memoir, detailing their experiences with migration, religion, and coming out, through the shaky lens of time and memory. Ortiz embraces the un/known, grapples with the “what if’s”, and finds comfort in the present. 

Ortiz is a Filipino poet, hailing from the southern islands of Mindanao and Lutruwita (Tasmania). These cultures heavily influence Ortiz’s approach throughout the collection as they combine Filipino with the English language, conveying their dis/placement. Ortiz depicts the melting pot quality of Filipino language and its crossovers with Spanish, Hokkien (a Chinese language variety) and Bahasa Indonesia, alongside the rigidity of Australian English. As a constantly displaced being, Ortiz finds a home in themselves and refuses to assimilate to be understood or palatable as they write,

“(after all, isn’t / australia also / a name / enacted, / tacked on like / an afterthought?) [sic]” (p. 78–79). 

Influenced by their culture, religion is also a key for combining the past with the present. Ortiz looks at religion from a feminine perspective, deifying women (both Christian and non-Christan). This allows Ortiz to cite women as Creators, as Gods, and, through this, Ortiz creates a new religion, matriarchically grounded. By writing “my mother’s body was once / my body / threshold of / bloodline memories / & the only earth i knew [sic]” (p. 45), Ortiz links identity and personhood to ones’ environment – whether that is the womb or the dirt beneath our feet. Thus, religion is a feminine-led experience for Ortiz.

Not only does Ortiz look to women as religious figures to explain their world, writing “2. Ask your mother what desire means / 3. Fail to recognise it inside the face of another girl, / the soft ache of want a dying hymm inside your lungs” (p. 26), but Ortiz depicts desire as a religion that knows no bounds – not gender, not location, not species. Through references to Star Trek, Ortiz shows how the expectations of Earth (white, cis, heterosexual) make aliens out of normalcy. In their poem “Self-Insert Trek: Flashback”, Ortiz describes this alien feeling when they write “learn how to pleasure another woman / in some far-off impossible / future” (p. 58). Here, the alien self is only able to experience autonomous desire in a fictionalised, far-off world. Existence as an “alien” almost feels impossible – rerouting us back to the oppressive feeling of shame. However, Ortiz refuses to let their queer life be an impossibility, when they reference Star Trek again to remind us “you see the whole universe / stretching out / you with her / & how it never / ever ends” (p. 106). For Ortiz, religion is in those connections – in the voice that does not quiet. 

I am a queer poet of “in/articulate identities” like Ortiz, and Past & Parallel Lives reflects my youth of un/discovery, of fear and shame, and I wish I had this book through that awkward phase of my life. Ortiz embraces their truth, their identity, and it is powerful. When they write,

“i name the line between knowing / and denial / i call it / home [sic]” (p. 19)

I feel my un/known queer body find peace – a constant emotion I revelled in throughout this collection. This idea of home/returning/leaving permeates the collection, grounding readers both here and there.

Similar to my queer experience, Ortiz places readers in an unstable state with no real “place”, but, for the first time in my life reading and writing queer poetry, I felt no shame in not knowing, in not belonging. Instead, Ortiz reorients how queer stories are told, revolutionising the genre. As Ortiz emphasises, “(you were born / not in a place / but a beginning)” (p. 47). Past & Parallel Lives makes me feel at home because, for the first time, I am in control of my own narrative. This is reflected in Ortiz’s poem “Masc.” when they write “I’m real real” (p. 91) – their words feel owned, not borrowed. This is their narrative, and we can feel Ortiz’s pulse within it. 

Ortiz wields time to look back, to reflect, to ruminate, and to grow from. As they “look at the memory as if / it’s underwater” (p. 85), they intentionally retain the lives that they dipped their toes into, emerging from the waves reborn, but not made new. 

You can buy the book here.

Find Kaya Ortiz on Instagram: @kayak.ortiz

Sarah Birch 

Deputy Publisher