FILIPINO-CANADIAN poet Patria Rivera of Toronto is a late bloomer: She did not write poetry until the early 1990s, after she was done parenting her brood of four girls—Ran, Kim, Isobel and Jenny.

Rivera—Patty to family and friends—just published BE (Signature Editions, Spring 2011), her third volume of poetry. A mass communications graduate of the University of the Philippines, Patty and her family immigrated to Canada in 1986 in search of the proverbial greener pasture.