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.
...
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."
No comments:
Post a Comment