Mark Anthony Cayanan

Mark Anthony Cayanan is a poet based out of Angeles City, Philippines. An Associate Professor at the University of the Philippines Diliman, they obtained an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin in Madison and a PhD from the University of Adelaide, where they were awarded the 2021 Doctoral Research Medal. Their poetry books are Narcissus (2011), Except you enthrall me (2013), and, most recently, Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous, which was published in Australia in 2021 and in the Philippines in 2024. Their fourth book of poetry, Miracle Fever, is forthcoming in 2026 from Northwestern University Press. They are the recipient of a postdoctoral fellowship from ICI Berlin and writing residencies from Civitella, Villa Sarkia, Art Omi, and Ventspils Writers’ House.  

For the Saari Residence, Cayanan intends to finish a long-gestating project: “Ecstasy Facsimile” is a book-length manuscript that uses, eponymously, “ecstasy” as a focal point, around which contiguous concepts are made to proliferate. This sequence flirts with the sinewy structure of the sonnet, capitalizing on the tension between the sonnet’s penchant for templated semantic movement, and its elasticity, owing to the ubiquity of its use. Though the poems in the sequence may telegraph as intensely personal and hew close to the solitary lyric, Cayanan resorts to appropriation as a method of composition, many of the poems originating in drafts which incorporate swaths of passages from, among various sources, news articles and investigative reports on Philippine realities, as well as other scholarly, philosophical, and creative texts which exhibit associative tissues with the primary preoccupation of the sequence or the author’s subject position. The hyperactive collation of texts and references provides a necessary, extroverted counterpoint to the sense of interiority that serves as precondition for ecstasy and its paradoxical experience of escaping the self.  

Consistent with the incongruous dynamics prompted through the use of appropriation in the ostensibly unitary lyric, Cayanan also deploys the predictable semantic flow of the sonnet to offset unruly states of existence, one informed by anxiety and depression, queer discomfiture, and social unrest. If ecstasy is a concept that, at its core, has to do with being jolted out of oneself, then the poems in “Ecstasy Facsimile” render realities that motivate the desire for this state, and telegraph attempts and failures at realizing it. A considerable portion of the sonnet sequence has been written: the residence at Saari, then, would allow Cayanan the time and space to ensure that the poems achieve their best and final form, and effectively engage one another in a quasi-conversation spanning the entire manuscript.  

Over the years, poems included in “Ecstasy Facsimile” have been published in several literary magazines and journals, including The Common, Dreginald, Crab Orchard Review, Figure 1, and Miracle Monocle.