His family had moved there following the Vietnam War; they resettled "between the Umatilla Army Depot and the Mountain Home Airforce Base", where de la Paz's mother worked as a pediatrician.

There, de la Paz stated, there was no Filipino American community, and he stopped speaking Tagalog.

"[5] In November of 2022, the poem "Diaspora Sonnet Traveling Between Apartment Rentals" was selected by Victoria Chang for The New York Times.

[7] LitHub recommended the book in a list of forthcoming poetry collections for July 2024, stating "One of Oliver de la Paz’s gifts is his sense of the book as a whole ... Amidst poems rich in details of the resulting changing natural landscapes emerge vivid portraits: we see the father in his twenties holding a hatbox, later, a gun.

[9] The Poetry Foundation said "De la Paz creates loops of words, actions, and images within the patterned design of poetic form, rhyme scheme, anaphoric titling, and poem ordering ...