“Near Your Mirror Home (Stay On) is a potent double-barreled work that is guaranteed to “blast through angelic listlessness.” In the entrancing hypnagogic montage “Near Your Mirror Home (Return to Nicholson Road),” which opens this volume, Javier goes “Deep within the muscle of The Dreaming,” colliding images and linguistic textures to conjure “a surprise theater of astonishment.” The second piece “Beside the Poem by Raúl Cordero in Times Square” is an inspired work of Asian American documentalism, which forcefully chants down white supremacist imperialism and AAPI hate. In Javier’s hands, words are what Aimé Césaire might call “miraculous weapons” that movingly resist “our rhythm / of violence / un / -stemmed.” With deceptive ease, Javier shuttles back and forth between the local and the global, the individual and the collective, the personal and the public, the mythic and the contemporary. If this sounds like magick, that’s because it is.” -- Michael Leong

“Near Your Mirror Home (Stay On) is a charge to keep perceiving the self clearly even inside the toxic mess of object losses, consumption, and the way epics and their “thelemic boat” haunt the psychic landscape of kin immersed in urbanization. In “Beside The Poem by Raúl Cordero in Times Square,” we see how the “Deep within the muscle of The Dreaming” builds a moving and powerful libretto. As with all of Paolo Javier’s poetic works, he brilliantly fathoms lines with a “unique interior of hollowed-out meaning to write expressively” and urgently engages both the metropolis and its burdens producing compelling recurrences that innovate space, speech, and sound.” -- Prageeta Sharma