NOT FLOWERS

March 2022

Winner of the 2021 Variant Lit Microchap Contest

“I have not been able to get ‘Kitchen’ out of my mind for months. And that is how my love for Noreen Ocampo’s Not Flowers began, with an earworm slinking its way into my subconscious. Yes, there is pain present, but overall, this chapbook is a nostalgic and optimistic body of work. It gave me something I’ve been searching for these past couple of years: hope.”

—Lannie Stabile, author of Good Morning to Everyone Except Men Who Name Their Dogs Zeus

“Quiet and delicate and lovely, NOT FLOWERS reintroduces readers to love and growing in all of its flashes - holds the hands and says we were here before, remember? I will be visiting and revisiting this collection for all my future comings-of-ages, and I am braver for it, this something to treasure between the palms. Ocampo is exacting and aflame as always, and is only just beginning, I am sure.”

—Jennifer Co, literary editor of {m}aganda Magazine 34

“A coming-of-age journey told through the language of flowers, Noreen Ocampo speaks to the ways we say goodbye to childhood, where in spite of these goodbyes, we at first experience a longing for the loved ones and places that go on to exist in our imagination. Gentle and innocent, Ocampo’s poems hold friendship and young love as if they were in the petal of a flower—their uncertainty and fragility—which are eternal and dear no matter how small or fleeting their moments. Ultimately these poems are a way of being—not of beginning or ending, not of reminiscing or predicting the future, not even of regret or hope—but that to simply be with all of love’s assurances is the point.”

—Elsa Valmidiano, author of We Are No Longer Babaylan

"Noreen Ocampo brings us something soft, fleeting, and ineradicable. Her poems remind me that flowers stand in for words sometimes: they are love notes, indicative of presence, absence, or longing. Flowers also feed us and our feelings, and these poems accompany a speaker who loves friends, family, and herself with the warmth of ‘sunshine laughing’ and even when she says ‘some parts of me never stop searing.’ These poems show us that growing up is about giving, asking questions, holding hands, and heading into a future dressed up in growth."

—Janice Lobo Sapigao, author of like a solid to a shadow and microchips for millions

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PRAISE FOR NOT FLOWERS

“The telling nature of Not Flowers by Noreen Ocampo is at once phenomenal and quotidian. I feel like I just gained a friend. Hugging our favorite stuffed animals, we stayed up all night. The room lit only by candlelight and a full moon shining through the windows with the curtains drawn. We told each other our secrets and ‘laugh-cried’ into the early morning.” —Melissa Ferrer, The Poetry Question

“Ocampo’s poems are airbrushed with childhood nostalgia and the romance of faded memories that plead us to hold them, not rigid, but with the fragility of dried flowers. They resonate with those certain specific memories most of us have of places and food and faint Sunday morning scenes and quarrels when love was not yet recognizable or marvelous because it was easy and as natural as breathing or eating together.” —Mashaal Sajid, Giving Room Mag

“Very infrequently does a poet arrest their reader in so few pages and with such a delicate touch as does Noreen Ocampo… The poetry of Not Flowers reads with the serenity of a Studio Ghibli meadow combined with the timeless Victorian illustrations by Kate Greenaway, curating a fantasy-adjacent field of poetry combining memory and the senses. Nonetheless, Ocampo’s Not Flowers remains deeply rooted in the present, utilizing the power of sensorial memory to curate the speaker’s soft, loving contemporary moment. Ultimately, Ocampo disrupts the seemingly dichotomous relationship between being a flower versus a “not-flower” and finds tenderness and nostalgia to be elements of strength, rather than of weakness.” —Jillian A. Fantin, Drizzle Review

"Ocampo shows us that we give a little of ourselves to every person we share love for, and in collecting these pieces of people we carry with us, we often find ourselves reshaping our boundaries and who we are as a person…Ocampo’s Not Flowers is refreshingly optimistic in how it reshapes our perspectives on childhood. It reminds us to remember where we came from and teaches us to find joy in our experiences. Not Flowers healed my inner child and taught me this: our growing pains are fleeting.” —Z Eihausen, Sundress Publications