Book Review: Field Guide for Accidents by Albert Abonado

By Jenna Winge

In Field Guide for Accidents (Beacon Press, 2024), Albert Abonado invites readers to take a glimpse into his story and life as a Filipino American poet. Selected as a winner of the 2023 National Poetry Series, Field Guide delivers stories of family and culture through descriptions so vivid it can become unsettling.

This collection is full of flavors and feelings as tales of foods tell stories of history and the hands that prepared them. The many forms and styles Abonado experiments with throughout this collection serve as an exhibition of his versatility.

Split into five sections, this collection takes readers through a variety of different vehicles that tell Abonado’s story. Variations in structure within this collection range from prose poems and lists to shorter, free verse poems. In those shorter poems, line breaks and spacing created such intentional pacing in pieces such as “You Must Wait 15 Minutes Before You Try Again” and “On The History Of The Line.”

Within this range of form and structure, one aspect of Abonado’s writing that elevates the quality of this collection is enjambment. The intentional line and stanza breaks create poems where each line holds multiple meanings, especially in “Recollection”:

Did you recognize the sun as your own

In this country? When you called your mother,

did she recognize your voice? What did you spend

to get here? What did you need

when you arrived? What did you want

to forget?

This poem also references one of the major themes of this collection: family. Although there are references to aunts, uncles, grandparents and siblings, the main familial relationships Abonado references are his wife, mother, and father. This is captured in the first poem of the collection when Abonado writes, “My wife wants to know why I reduce my poems / to something that fits in my mouth. I don’t tell her I buried / my relatives in my throat, that my prayers belong to other / voices.”

Alongside referencing the familial themes of this collection, this quote also encapsulates themes of poetry and religion as well as the repeated imagery of the mouth used throughout the book.

These recurring themes and images give Field Guide an excellent sense of narrative cohesion. Stories from earlier pieces make appearances in poems that come later. That noted, Abonado’s collection might best be experienced by reading from start to finish instead of skipping around. For example, Abonado’s parents endured a car crash — a detail first mentioned in this collection’s namesake piece, “A Field Guide for Accidents.”

The following sections consistently reference the accident, most notably in “Landscape With Car Wreck And Father”:

everywhere. Not pictured: his feet, deflated airbag. Not pictured:

blood on the dashboard, men in a garage. I cannot draw a line

to what I cannot see. The photograph makes my father appear

further away. I measure his head against my thumb. How do

I approach him from this distance? I squish his face below my

thumb. He walks away from the wreck. Or towards the edge

of the frame. What difference does that make?

Among the uncomfortable recurring mentions of his parents’ accident, Abonado touches upon another difficult subject: racism. Whether he is just reciting race-based sleep statistics or describing his own specific stories, Abonado shares his experiences as a Filipino American. The most prominent poem that displays this is “Punchline,” where he discusses conforming to “whiteness” and standing by in the face of casual racism from friends in his youth:

He told another joke, this time about Mexicans, about Indians,

about the Polish, about Italians and blonde women. You were

on the late bus returning home or the backseat of his car while

his father drove. You showed your white friend that none of

this bothered you, that you knew how to ride alongside him,

that you weren’t sensitive, not a whiny punkass, you knew

Abonado displays his well-honed storytelling skills in Field Guide for Accidents. The recurring themes and structures make this collection incredibly vivid and cohesive. He makes the reader understand just how he feels, whether it is through the pacing of a poem, the imagery, or the metaphors.

I especially recommend this collection to those who enjoy the pure craft of poetry. There were countless moments while reading where I noted choices Abonado made, so I could attempt them in my own works. One example is in “About the Horses” where Abonado breaks the fourth wall of the poem in lines such as: “I worry this poem has gotten away from me” and “this should be / the start of the poem, but I leave it here for now.”

Even for someone who is not Filipino American, this is a valuable read. Field Guide for Accidents can be an educational experience for any type of reader. The casual poetry reader is given a portrait into a new culture, and aspiring poets are shown innovative writing styles and techniques.

Abonado will be a featured writer at Lakeland University’s annual Great Lakes Writers Festival on November 6–7. Click here for details.

About the reviewer: Jenna Winge is an undergraduate at Lakeland University and story editor for Lakeland’s student news site, The Mirror.