Oroboro at Iba Pang Abiso

Mordant yet playful, cerebral yet politically engaged, Tilde Acuña's genre-defying Oroboro at Iba Pang Abiso portrays the Philippines a century hence as a dystopian "Neon Filipino" theme park-cum-leisure city writ large and territorially divided into the naziones of Filipinorte and Pinasur, where thrive cyber siga and descendants (Ferdinand Marcos V, Snowflake Aquino VI, Princess Sarah Duterte) of familiar tyrants of the home, school, church, and state, but also denizens capable of nurturing critical thought and activist solidarities across the virtual and real worlds.

— CAROLINE S. HAU

Speaking as a longtime fan of Tilde Acuña's art and not as a basic blurb-provider equipped with basic intentions and pretty words for garnishing a book's back cover, I say buy Oroboro at Iba Pang Abiso because it will reaffirm your love for subversive retellings, the narrative of the anti-narrative, the off-kilter, the absurd. Here, you get blistering irony so taut there's no rattling its bones. You get to feel around—blindly at first—for the length of your chain, your proximity to liberation. You get artistic innovation that takes no prisoners. You get polemics and its electric defilements, some fabulously soiled underthings, typographic interferences, anachronisms, pseudepigrapha, possibly an amuse-bouche of "Nutribun for the Soul," and a dizzying sense of scale of the past and future—two halves of the historical timeline which are actually, as this book demonstrates, indistinguishable from one another. Mostly, I see Oroboro as the first book of the prodigious anarchist whose blog I used to low-key stalk some years ago. But you just might see it as you would an Apocrypha, a rogue canon in the literature of radical imagination.

— KRISTINE ONG MUSLIM