Dani Putney is a mixed-race Filipinx, non-binary poet who grew up in Sacramento and Fernley, and now lives in Reno. Their second full-length poetry collection, Mix-Mix, set to be released on April 8 by Baobab Press, is a fearless excavation of their heritage, their personal history, and the history of colonialism as they’ve searched for selfhood and belonging.
Putney’s father was a white American man, and their mother was a mail-order bride from the Philippines—with a 33-year age gap between them.
“I do feel displaced being a mixed-race person growing up in America who did not have access to the languages my mom spoke,” they said. “My dad forbade her from teaching my brother and me Tagalog, because he wanted us to be more American.”
In the first poem, “Heritage,” Putney writes, “home only makes sense if I say colonialism.”
As the book unfolds, Putney navigates the placeless intersections of their identities. In “Ani-mimetic Body,” they self-create through representations of masculinity—“can’t separate the urge to fuck / & to become”—and femininity—“laws of nature disappear to align / my flat chest with spiked rose … .” Ultimately, neither of those two gender expressions fully encapsulates their experience: “no, I’m yellow & more yellow, / infinity in the cosmos of my marrow.”
The book title, Mix-Mix, comes from the English translation of halo-halo, a layered, frozen desert from the Philippines that works as a metaphor for Putney’s intersectional identities: “I see myself in the cup’s crushed / ice, scattered like islands / throughout an archipelago.” Food, the only connection they were allowed to Filipino culture growing up, becomes an entry point for exploring their personal history, intertwined with the violent history of imperialism.
The bedrock of Mix-Mix is a series of documentary-style poems titled either “Footnotes to Marriage by Correspondence” or “Asian Romance Guide to Marriage by Correspondence,” the latter the title of a 1989 guidebook for prospective husbands.
“I discovered the guidebook after my dad passed away in 2016,” Putney said. “It was heavily annotated, with bank wire-transfer numbers, addresses, credit card numbers, things circled and highlighted.”
The “Romance Guide” poems feature letters from American men who had married mail-order brides. One—from a 36-year-old Californian dentist—reads, in part, “Jasmin, I am serious about finding a Filipina wife, heaven knows I could use help around the house. …”
The “Footnotes” poems serve as a manual for acquiring a bride, offering advice on matters such as stationery, conversation topics and preparation for life in America: “Drivers’ Education: very few ladies know how to drive we recommend that you send your special Filipina to driving school.”
“This book is quasi-documentary,” said Putney, adding that around a quarter of it is composed of found material.
The documentary style, blending personal and historical narratives, is influenced by Putney’s study of Filipino-American poetics and Southeast and East Asian art history during their time pursuing an English Ph.D. at Oklahoma State University. “List of Illustrations” consists of poems with empty boxes and captions, mimicking museum labels.
“I studied a lot of Filipino history through art,” Putney said. “The captions reference objects from the speakers’ or their parents’ lives. The redacted images reflect historical and personal absences—things intentionally hidden from me growing up.”
The troubling history of the fetishization of Asian women by American men appears in the book, sometimes in sexual situations: “I’ve been called a global / citizen, but I prefer exotic / I only sleep with dirty-blond, / blue-eyed boys / because I / can’t forget I’m special.” Putney has internalized the impact of this history: “I read in a textbook once / that Asian American women / marry white men, whether / deliberately or subconsciously, / to assimilate.”
“It’s never about the actual sex,” Putney said. “Rather, it’s about everything around the sex—power dynamics, internal struggles.”
The climax—or perhaps the denouement—of Mix-Mix comes in “Multitude,” a personal essay interrupting the poems near the book’s center. Here, Putney self-psychoanalyzes their relationship with their father, who was emotionally and physically abusive to their mother, and ponders that relationship’s impact on their queerness and sexuality. The essay’s entry point is Putney’s discovery, at age 24, of Walt Whitman’s infamous nude photo series. Putney found the photos of an older man arousing, an experience that eventually led to them exploring some complex daddy issues in the essay.
Putney weaves together their father’s history—he once confessed to having loved a man in the Air Force but “got over it”—with Whitman’s homoerotic poetics, also touching on the history of daddy-type gay male figures in poetry like Allen Ginsberg, who wrote a poem imagining a sexual tryst with Walt Whitman in a supermarket and pursued boys under the age of 18. These elements serve as a lens for Putney to unravel their own sexual identity, leading to a turning point in their selfhood.
Ultimately, the journey isn’t about their father, Whitman or Ginsberg, but about understanding their parents’ relationship and its impact on their own identity. Though their parents’ union was fraught, Putney recognizes their mother’s agency: “Ma chose to advertise herself in the Asian Romance catalog … immigrating to California as a 24-year-old picture bride. She was an agent, my dad her collaborator.” Eventually, Putney acknowledged, “She and I have the same type.”
In the end, Putney finds empowerment in their sexuality and non-binary identity, rejecting the cycles of harm and choosing transformation: “I refused to grow up, so I became non-binary. As a not-man, I avoid replicating my dad’s abuse. Instead of wielding violence, I transform it into cosmic energy. I’d rather be haunted than haunt.”
Dani Putney will be reading from their new book of poetry, Mix-Mix, at Mountain Music Parlor, 735 S. Center St., at 6:30 p.m., Thursday, April 24, as part of the National Poetry Month Reading Series. (Full disclosure: Max Stone will also be reading at the event.) Copies of Mix-Mix will be available at the Radical Cat and the Baobab Press webstore at bookshop.org/shop/baobabpress.