I first came across Jaiden Geolingo’s work scrolling through diode poetry journal, stumbling onto a poem that stopped me cold, its language at once tender and unflinching. In his lyric precision and layered imagery, I felt echoes of R.A. Villanueva, one of my own mentors, has a kinship in how both poets braid heritage, migration, and the body into something luminous, something special, something needed. At just the start of his career, Jaiden is already doing the kind of work that matters deeply: reclaiming space for BIPOC narratives, challenging the erasure that so often shapes literary canons, and writing with a maturity far beyond his years.
In How to Migrate Ghosts (Kith Books, 2025),his debut chapbook, Jaiden navigates the fracture and resilience of displacement, moving between kitchens and coastlines, prayers and protest, the homeland and the body that carries it. In our conversation, we talk about food as resistance, the haibun as a bridge between identities, the mentors and ancestors who shaped his voice, and how the body becomes both archive and map.
DP: In Ode to Pork Adobo, food becomes both an anchor and a site of mourning, where flavor holds the memory of a homeland. How do you see the act of cooking and eating functioning as a form of resistance against assimilation and forgetting?
JG: Thank you for this wonderful question! When I wrote Ode to Pork Adobo, the main goal was to seize both the gentleness and the wreckage of moving to another country through cuisine. Cultural food is one of the fulcrums to my identity, and this untethering of that part of selfhood was almost tantamount to destruction. Adobo is a dish that I’ve intrinsically associated with memory, because there is something so sacramental to it that I wanted to transform into poeticism.
This was the vision of my piece: eating something so deeply rooted in the Philippines, but yet I’m doing this in America— a nation built on cultural melting pots and its westernization— that it feels like an act of treason, and it doesn’t feel the same; nothing here ever really eclipses that turmoil. It turns into a kind of artifact that’s never quite back to its original form. Since I haven’t been back to the Philippines since I moved—and probably won’t for years—this act of eating is how I tap into those kinds of heirlooms. Yes, cuisine is the most intimate gateway I have back home; but yet, despite all this, that gateway is never congruent to what I’ve grown familiar with. Ode to Pork Adobo is resistance against American culture. Consumption is how I reclaim that space for myself.
DP: In Haibun On Pinoy Bodies, you weave biblical imagery, colonial memory, and intimate family moments. How does working within hybrid forms like the haibun help you hold the tension between displacement and belonging?
JG: Ocean Vuong’s “Immigrant Haibun” was one of the first poems I’ve ever read, and it was my first introduction to the haibun. I wanted to honor that form while making it my own. The haibun—combining prose-poetry and haiku—has this duality that mirrors immigrant identity: a body split between two countries. In Haibun On Pinoy Bodies, the form became this sort of trembling bridge. It allowed me to hold my religious upbringing, family, and displacement in the same space without forcing them to resolve.
DP: Your debut chapbook How to Migrate Ghosts, forthcoming on August 28, 2025, feels like a fragile bridge between two worlds. What catalyzed this collection as your first published work, and who—voices, poets, ancestors—inspired you to compile it?
JG: I think the catalyst to this book was, as always, grief. Immigration is a surprisingly fluid road to navigate. At times, I find myself colliding with waves of homesickness, and at times, I find myself not missing home at all. There is always conflict in that regard that I’ve eventually grown to learn that there is no clear formula to grief.
Aside from the palpable themes of immigration in my book, I also wanted to touch upon a more umbrella theme, which is intangibility. I have a few poems in this book that are about subjects with little to no correlation to immigration, and poems with immigration as its steering wheel. That’s where the ghosts in the title comes in: loss is a theme that is in the backdrop of all these poems, and inevitably, it starts to haunt.
On the other end of your question: as opposed to digesting poetry through books, I tend to consume work from reading literary magazines (some favorites: diode, POETRY, and The Adroit Journal). I believe that literary journals can hold more weight than a regular book can; as a writer, it beckons you to create work without the anvil of market pressures and publishing costs; as a reader, you’re exposed to a sacred kind of readership: one where there’s no constraints of a paywall— these magazines are here because they want to showcase humanized rawness. Not because of service to capitalism.
I am also a teen writer. What does this mean for me? In a space that’s so clustered with adult writers, I learned that finding kinship among other young poets has been crucial; I wouldn’t be here, in this interview, without them. They’ve helped me understand that age is not a quantifiable variable to passion. My biggest inspirations, though, are my family and mentors. They have shown me the notion that poetry could be more than a private deed, that it could reach, bind, and dispel all together. My heritage and identity are at the nucleus of everything I write, and this chapbook is where they intersect on the page in a unifying act.
DP: Across these poems, there’s a visceral interplay between the body and the nation—how flesh, taste, and landscape carry the weight of history. How do you navigate writing about the body in ways that honor its vulnerability while confronting its politicization?
JG: I’ve always been drawn to anatomical imagery, partly because I have an interest in science, but also because homesickness is a physical and palpable force. It’s in your bones and sinews as much as in your memory. Writing about the body became a way to explore the violence of assimilation and immigration without romanticizing that sensitivity.
The body is both map and archive. It remembers even when we try to forget. And while my style has evolved since writing How to Migrate Ghosts, I can still see that thread from then to now—the same impulse to let the body speak for itself, even when the language is fractured, and, all at once, unified into these bodies of light.
Darius Phelps is a poet, educator, and scholar whose work explores grief, identity, and liberation through poetic inquiry. He is a Poetry Co-Editor at Matter, Associate Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, and the author of the forthcoming My God’s Been Silent.
Jaiden Geolingo is a Pinoy writer based in Georgia, United States, and the author of How to Migrate Ghosts (kith books, 2025). His work has been recognized by the National YoungArts Foundation, the Georgia Council for the Arts, and the Alliance for Young Writers & Artists, among others. A finalist for the Georgia Poet Laureate’s Prize and a 2025 National YoungArts Winner, his writing appears or is forthcoming in diode poetry journal, The Poetry Society, The Shore, and elsewhere. He is the editor-in-chief of Hominum Journal. Someday, he will be good at math.