Poetry. REPRODUCTIONS OF THE EMPTY FLAGPOLE is the first U.S. collection by Eileen R. Tabios, winner of the Phillipines' National Book Award for Poetry. "Her poems allows out minds to be excited twice, by the psychological and artistic reference points from which the words zoom-out like handpicked bees from a hive, and by the vivid hum of the poems themselves demonstrating a captivation, utterly original imagination. In her lines, which are at once strict and sensual, Eileen Tabios inserts stingers barbed with wit and political incisiveness..Hers is a poetics of social and cultural interrogation in which she succeeds in uniting what she would call the 'covex with the concave.' REPRODUCTIONS OF THE EMPTY FLAGPOLE will stand you straight up"-Forrest Gander.

Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole

Literature & Fiction

Tabios, Eileen R.

Poetry

Marsh Hawk Press

Poetry. Memoir. Asian American Studies. With I TAKE THEE, ENGLISH, FOR MY BELOVED, Eileen R. Tabios melds the forms of poem, memoir, art monograph, play, novel and questionnaire to affirm that the poet not only speaks English, but she loves English. From her love, she crafts poems denoting a unique vision, as well as other writings that transcend inherited literary forms. This collection ends with a close reading by Ron Silliman of one of Tabios' poems through which he concludes, "Tabios tries for more in one page than many other poets would attempt in 20. And she pulls it off."

I Take Thee, English, for My Beloved

Poetry. Memoir. Asian American Studies. Filipino American Studies. Winner of the Philippines' National Book Award for Poetry, Eileen R. Tabios has a reputation for uniquely melding ekphrasis and transcolonialism. This collection of poems, prose and visual poetry is her most overtly political work yet, referencing her roots as a "Marcos Baby," a member of the generation that grew up under Ferdinand Marcos' dictatorship. On April 11, 2006, Filamore B. Tabios, Sr. died of brain cancer and its complications. In writing about her father, Eileen R. Tabios explores reconciliation with Ferdinand Marcos' legacy through deliberate empathy with the former Philippine dictator's daughter Imee; pays homage to Judas Iscariot whose Gospel, discovered during her vigil by her father's deathbed, reveals him to be the most loyal disciple, instead of greatest betrayer of Jesus Christ; meditates on the murder statistics of the 20th century's leading killers, from Idi Amin to Adolf Hitler; considers the global Filipina pen pal phenomena; and engages with Dante Aleghieri's Purgatorio.

The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes: Our Autobiography

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

LIGHT SANG AS IT LEFT YOUR EYES: Our Autobiography

Marsh Hawk Pr

Poetry. Asian American Studies. In Eileen R. Tabios's 16th print poetry collection, NOTA BENE EISWEIN, Tabios applies the methodology of making Eiswein, a German sweet wine, for extracting poems from her readings of Christian Hawkey's poetry collection THE BOOK OF FUNNELS and Sarah Bird's novel The Flamenco Academy. NOTA BENE EISWEIN extends Tabios's body of work that is unique for melding ekphrasis with transcolonialism. Just as she is inspired by other art forms for creating poetry, her poems have been translated into other art media--Paintings, Video, Drawings, Visual Poetry, Mixed Media Collages, Kali Martial Arts, Modern Dance and Sculpture--in addition to languages such as Spanish, Italian, Tagalog, Japanese, and Portuguese.

Nota Bene Eiswein

Ahadada Books

Poetry. THE THORN ROSARY offers a selection of prose poems written by Eileen R. Tabios, including poems from hard-to-find early books and as released in the past twelve years by publishers in the U.S., Philippines, Australia and Finland. Advance words include, from John Olson: "Tabios is a seamstress of the surreal, combining erudition and art historical references with flourishes of verbal color and surge. Ramifications at the fringe of consciousness thread brocades of textural ardor in a luster of compound interest. Her work ... is 'a blissful difficulty,' ... a perception with a nerve."

Thorn Rosary: Selected Prose Poems, 1998-2010

Poetry. LGBT Studies. THE RELATIONAL ELATIONS OF ORPHANED ALGEBRA is a ground-breaking collaboration of poems and poetics essays. "Began" by Eileen R. Tabios who crafted poems melding algebra and orphans, this unique project was "finished" by j/j hastain who echoed the poems first musically and then by way of meditations on Trans identity(ies). The collaboration presents several text approaches including essays addressing Tabios' international adoption experience and hastain's suggestion for more natural and less violent pronouns that transcend gender binaries."Categories are not abstractions, they are bodies. Family is one such embodied category, gender another. What happens to bodies when they don't fit the categories assigned them, when they lack families, when they criss-cross gender or genre lines? How can one calculate such change, compose equations to explain these trans-categorical shifts? Our very pronouns are at stake, as are nations, blood-ties, definitions to words like 'dad' and 'belonging.' As j/j hastain writes, 'There is a new lineage that we are trying to make more apparent.' Tabios and hastain are trans-parents to a fresh embodiment of words and bodies, and to what they mean when they come together as books and persons. Their writing counts the change(s) in unexpected vocabularies."―Susan M. Schultz

the relational elations of ORPHANED ALGEBRA

hastain, j/j

Poetry. Art. Asian &amp; Asian American Studies. SUN STIGMATA is a sculpture-inspired poetry collection from an award-winning poet known for her innovative approaches. The book includes poetics prose and an art essay. "Eileen Tabios's poems twist like silk scarves caught in the wind, offering ardent calligraphies and sly subversions of the passions, so many ways of naming lucidity."—Andrew Joron "In her new collection, SUN STIGMATA, Eileen Tabios has sculpted poems of light and shadow by using the blade of time to cut through stone. What is revealed as 'through a ripped hole in space,' is rendered 'as unforgiving as a sniper's eye...' With lapidary precision, Tabios links the personal to the eternal while deepening what is essentially human: '...did the Greeks attain / Purity? / Did I earn the moments / I made my mother cry...' Whether she is probing Rimbaud in the act of assigning colors to vowels, or recalling a lost generation of women in Manila 'hugging ashed corners of hopeless streets,' the voice is urgent and oracular, riding the radar between orders, implicit and explicit, in time and space. 'The most implacable border / can be the invisible / so that nothing is hidden from sight.' SUN STIGMATA reminds us of what art can do when it rises to the level of Mystery in which the initiates are transformed: the stigmata incarnated on these pages bleed spirit and awaken soul."—Paul Pines

Sun Stigmata (Sculpture Poems)

Poetry. "Forgetfulness and remembering are two sides of the same coin—and that coin is anybody! Reading Eileen Tabios, we are reminded about the extent to which we are, after all, the sum of our experiences, and the extent to which my experiences may just as well be yours, or yours or yours or yours! The impressions and remembrances we hold as unique to ourselves may just as well belong to somebody else. Tabios demonstrates their interchangeableness, their downright universality! One might ask, whose memoir is this anyway? AMNESIA: SOMEBODY'S MEMOIR is everybody's memoir!" —Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino

Amnesia: Somebody's Memoir

Black Radish Books

The title poem, "Because I Love You, I Become War," is a poem of feminist genius, deserving to be in the pantheon of all-time brilliant poems!--Sascha A. Akhtar, author of #LoveLikeBlood 
Raw[ness] exudes from this collection of poems and poetics prose about love and war, both corporal and terrestrial. Whether speaking of "rose petals yawning like little girls, like the daughters I never bore," or a California wildfire's "yellowed skies" and "smoke taint," even color is narrative in Eileen Tabios' dexterous hands. 
"Since her first works, Eileen Tabios' performances--in prose, poetic artifices, and mixed constructions or inventions--have always sharpened the cutting-edge of contemporary global cultural events. Art has morphed into a dazzling multiverse of sensuous happenings. Undoing the conceptual habit of reframing and parodic mimicry, she has created a new form of montage in texts such as Because I Love you, I Become War and President Duterte Socializes Media, etc.--witty humor jostling with sharp critique and graceful Spieltrieb. Enjoy in this volume the exercise of a rare intelligence that weaves the semiotic subtleties of icon, index, and symbol into epiphanies and discoveries that are, indeed, new additions to our world as we know it so far."--E. San Juan, Jr., author of Maelstrom over the Killing Fields 
Poetry. Essay. Poetics. Asian & Asian American Studies.

Because I love you, I Become War Poems & Uncollected Poetics

Essays & Correspondence

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Books by Tabios, Eileen R.