Nine Arches Press
Adventures in poetry
Neon Manila
Troy Cabida
ISBN: 9781916760301
eISBN: 9781916760318
Price: £11.99
Publication date: 30th October 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Territories: World
Extent: 72pp
DCF: Poetry Collections
Neon Manila is an exploration of the queer Filipino body in all of its skin and glitter. Looking at pop music, fashion, jewellery, dating mishaps, and everyday London life, the poems in this collection seek a better grasp of the relationships we build with ourselves, of the internal as constantly contoured by the external.
Praise for Neon Manila
‘Troy Cabida’s stunning debut takes the idea of vulnerability within a poem and repackages a new world where ‘grief [is] turned tactile, thus breakable.’ I love how Cabida constantly surprises: an image of light on sunglasses ‘like sun against a skyscraper’. Neon Manila is a beautiful, tender elegy for intimacy.’ - Joe Carrick-Varty
‘In poems that both haunt and delight with all their restless perception, Neon Manila navigates the glittery maze in which notions of brownness and desirability, queerness and hospitality, intermingle, quarrel, roil, and romp. Like the most delicious gossip and the most devastating prayer, Troy Cabida’s work brings its reader into a world of unflinching vulnerability. Like a lover’s pit-stained, memory-scented turtleneck sweater, this book intoxicates with a stinging clarity. What a stylish and truly bold debut.’ - Chen Chen
‘Like the electric glow in its title, Neon Manila is a sharp light against a dark backdrop. The poems illuminate in their flirtatious ways of dressing & undressing, revealing the brown boy self, silhouetted, accessorized, winterized, muscular, vulnerable.’ - Joseph Legaspi
‘An entirely moving collection exploring the fullness of materiality and being. Here is the body rendered weighted and weightless, dressed and naked.’ - Rachel Long
‘Neon Manila is a captivating and slim read, and the voice Cabida introduces in these poems blend the vibrant prominence of neon with manilla’s imprintable mundanity. With all its sardonicism, its ethic of referentiality, and its full-throated desire, I recommend this book to you.’ - Oluwaseun Olayiwola
‘Neon Manila is a brilliant lyrical exploration of what it means to exist in a queer brown body. The poetry moves between fashion, Freud and family with ease, grace and insight. A powerful debut by a poet who is definitely one to watch.’ - Nathalie Teitler
Troy Cabida is the author of Symmetric of Bone (fourteen poems, 2024) and War Dove (Bad Betty Press, 2020). His recent work appears in State of Play, Bi+ Lines,100 Queer Poems, and Tiffany & Co., as well as being shortlisted for the Bridport Prize for Poetry 2024. An alumnus of the Barbican Young Poets, he currently works for the National Poetry Library and holds a BA in Psychosocial Studies from Birkbeck, University of London. His debut full-length collection, Neon Manila, will be published by Nine Arches Press in 2025.
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The Nine Arches Press blog features poems from many of our poets, as well as interviews and articles.
