Neon Manila by Troy Cabida

Neon Manila, the debut poetry collection by Troy Cabida, is an exploration of the queer Filipino body in all of its skin and glitter. Under the spinning disco ball, Cabida captures facets of pop music, fashion, jewellery, dating mishaps, and of London life. These dazzling poems seek perspectives on the relationships we build with ourselves, how the external world shapes us, and how we live with being both fragile and unbreakable.

At their luminous heart, Cabida’s poems range between bittersweet longing, irresistible openness, and the desire to belong and to break out – particularly from the various kinds of discrimination that attempt to confine us. Neon Manila is a glorious, bold, wholehearted resistance to that, full of sparkly and sophisticated poems that refuse to dim their light. 

Praise for Neon Manila

‘Troy Cabida’s stunning debut takes the idea of vulnerability within a poem and repackages a new world where ‘grief [is] turned tactile, thus breakable.’ I love how Cabida constantly surprises: an image of light on sunglasses ‘like sun against a skyscraper’. Neon Manila is a beautiful, tender elegy for intimacy.’ - Joe Carrick-Varty  

‘In poems that both haunt and delight with all their restless perception, Neon Manila navigates the glittery maze in which notions of brownness and desirability, queerness and hospitality, intermingle, quarrel, roil, and romp. Like the most delicious gossip and the most devastating prayer, Troy Cabida’s work brings its reader into a world of unflinching vulnerability. Like a lover’s pit-stained, memory-scented turtleneck sweater, this book intoxicates with a stinging clarity. What a stylish and truly bold debut.’ -  Chen Chen

‘Like the electric glow in its title, Neon Manila is a sharp light against a dark backdrop. The poems illuminate in their flirtatious ways of dressing & undressing, revealing the brown boy self, silhouetted, accessorized, winterized, muscular, vulnerable.’ -  Joseph Legaspi

‘An entirely moving collection exploring the fullness of materiality and being. Here is the body rendered weighted and weightless, dressed and naked.’ -  Rachel Long

‘Neon Manila is a captivating and slim read, and the voice Cabida introduces in these poems blend the vibrant prominence of neon with Manila’s imprintable mundanity. With all its sardonicism, its ethic of referentiality, and its full-throated desire, I recommend this book to you.’ -  Oluwaseun Olayiwola

‘Neon Manila is a brilliant lyrical exploration of what it means to exist in a queer brown body. The poetry moves between fashion, Freud and family with ease, grace and insight. A powerful debut by a poet who is definitely one to watch.’ - Nathalie Teitler

Paperback / 72 pages