A REVIEW OF EILEEN R. TABIOS' THE INVENTOR

TC Marshall reviews Eileen R. Tabios' literary autobiography THE INVENTOR in the new issue of The Halo Halo Review. You can see the entire review HERE, but here are excerpts:

"THE INVENTOR: A Poet's Transcolonial Autobiography is not just about one person who invented things. It is about several inventions in poetics brought to us by Eileen R. Tabios. For all that Mary Anderson and her windshield wiper did to improve life on the road, Tabios’ story is larger and involves nearly all of us as it works to transcend and repair the damage done by colonial attitudes and practices. In this book, you hear about poetic inventions, forms and methods and approaches that make for new possibilities in poetry and beyond, about poetry as a purposeful practice and a way of improving life.

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All poetry implies a poetics. Eileen Tabios’ has made this fact a focus without stopping there. The poetics of her poetry has social implications. It is actively anti-colonial, pointedly de-colonizing, and perpetually inventive. It is a good deed, a mitzvah, an action of connection as it makes such mitzvot more possible for more of us. Read THE INVENTOR and try some of its approaches; you’ll get it, and you’ll want to become a “Transcolonial” inventor too. As Tabios says, “through poetry, I wish for no one or nothing to be alien to me” (43); you can get there yourself by employing forms and approaches that let anything arise. As she says at the end, “Dear Reader, my poetry has never been my words, but yours” (99). This book is a seed packet; so read it, and go grow some poetry yourself."

LIANE STRAUSS REVIEWED IN THE HUDSON REVIEW!

 Congratulations to Liane Strauss for receiving a fine review of her contest-winning collection, THE FLAWS IN THE STORY, from Mark Jarman and as published in THE HUDSON REVIEW, Autumn 2024. Here's an excerpt of the review:

"There is from line to line a sense of erasure, a lack of linkage, which can produce aphorism. In the case of “Forsan et Haec Olim Meminisse Iuvabit,” a passage of the Aeneid which has been translated various ways, the poet adds her translation in a note, “A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this.” Strauss attributes this version to Robert Fagles, in explanation of a line that had given him trouble as a translator. In Rolfe Humphries’ translation of the Aeneid, that line, from book I, is rendered, “Some day, perhaps, remembering even this / Will be a pleasure. ” Aeneas is reminding his shipmates of the perils they have survived before landing near Carthage. Strauss for her part is reminding us of the layers of interpretation that may come between a reader and a text. These surely are the flaws in the story. And it may be such flaws which give rise to Strauss’s aphoristic bent. As she states in the first line of “Sanctuary, ” “I know as soon as I wake up it’s time to start rethinking everything again. ” The occasion is New Year’s Day, but the experience, she implies, occurs every morning. For rethinking we can imagine reweaving. Like Penelope, we remake our stories with all their flaws, daily. Liane Strauss has given us an invaluable book of poetry about reading and finding ourselves in a paradox of being both narrator and narrative of our own lives. “History is lit, history is vanishing,” she writes punningly in the book’s final poem."

ILYA KAMINSKY PARTICIPATES IN "CHAPTER ONE"!

You are invited to read Ilya Kaminsky's essay "Reading Dante in Ukraine" in the November installment of Marsh Hawk Press' "Chapter One" series. You can read the entire essay HERE, and it begins as follows:

I have a friend who, before she ran from Kyiv as Russia bombarded the city in early 2022, spent weeks shivering in the bomb shelters as the city was shelled.

At first, she first recited poems by heart, and then she began to translate the poems she remembered.

That is how she got through the hours.

Who is to tell me after this that poetry doesn’t matter?