304



Villa, José García (1908–1997)
José García Villa was born in Singalong, Manila, to
Guía García and Dr. Simeón Villa, personal phy-
sician to revolutionary general Emilio Aguinaldo.
Villa’s complex relationship with his father sym-
bolizes the generational tension between a father
living in the past and a son eager to embrace the
new American culture. Villa graduated from high
school in 1925 and began taking college courses
first as a pre-med and later as a pre-law major.
Meanwhile, his interest in literature and art in
general grew rapidly. In 1929 he was suspended
from the University of the Philippines and fined
by the Manila Court because of his series of ob-
scene erotic poems called Man Songs. In the same
year, however, he won a prize from the Philippine
Free Press for his short story “Mir-i-Nisa.” With the
prize of 1,000 pesos, he immigrated to the United
States, where he lived until his death.
In the United States, Villa attended the Univer-
sity of New Mexico, where he edited and published
a literary magazine called Clay. Soon he began to
collaborate with a number of young American
writers. When his short-story collection, Footnote
to Youth. Short Stories, was published in 1993, Ed-
ward J. O’Brien, in his introduction to the book,
considered Villa as one of the half dozen impor-
tant American short-story writers.
Considered a leading modernist American
poet, Villa wrote many metaphysical but innova-

tive poems. His “comma poems,” in which he puts

a comma after each word in order to force slow

enunciation, and his attempts to build his own his-

tory through the creation of an imaginary home-

land called Doveglion (dove, eagle, and lion) are

examples of his innovative poetic experiments. The

golden period of his poetic production, between

his arrival in the United States in 1929 and his

“retirement” from writing poetry in 1953, saw the

publication of his poetry anthologies such as Many

Voices, poems (1939), Poems (1941), Have Come,

Am Here (1942), Volume Two (1949), and Selected

Poems and New (1958). But in the mid-1950s Gar-

cía Villa gave up writing poems abruptly because,

he argued, he did not wish to repeat himself.

Covadonga Lamar Prieto

Village Bride of Beverly Hills, The

Kavita Daswani (2004)

KAVITA DASWANI’s first novel, FOR MATRIMONIAL

PURPOSES, had focused on the courtship experiences

of a young Indo-American woman, Anju. This sec-

ond novel of Daswani explores the life of Priya, an

Indian bride who comes to Los Angeles following

an arranged marriage. We follow Priya’s story from

the time her marriage is arranged to Sanjay to her

arrival in California after the wedding. Priya finds

that life in Los Angeles is not happy since she lives

V