Hello Joy
By JArvis SUbia
Hello Joy is a blissful dive into the current of sorrow and ecstasy which make up the cycles of our depression. This collection is an ode to all the simple moments of pleasure that pull us back to the shoreline, that despite our surmounting darkness will always and inevitably find our joy again.
“This collection of poems is exciting, undeniably energetic, and full of a life fighting for each day, each dance. Jarvis Subia’s poems name and color in the questions that come with mental health, queerness, masculinity, and belonging. These poems show how growth means to pour into yourself. These are poems of fun and funk, of intensity and imagination, of celebration and self, “Like I still brought the whole hood / Who didn't come with me / To the club tonight, / Like I aint the Hyphy-ist rainbow / In the Bay, boi!” These poems are out here, and to Hello Joy, we say, YES and WE SEE YOU! We see you back.”
-Janice Sapigao
“Hello Joy invites the reader into a deeply intimate personal reflection where we both witness and participate in the humane tending of self. Jarvis shows us his wonderfully imperfect garden and encourages us to get busy in our own soil. This work is vulnerable reclamation and confessional and ethnography and declaration.”
- Darius Simpson, Author of Never Catch Me
