“... a restlessness, an ardent quest for a means of pure saying.” —American Book Review
Eileen R. Tabios: The Thorn Rosary
Selected Prose Poems & New (1998-201o)

THE THORN ROSARY gathers a selection of prose poems by Eileen R. Tabios that were released between 1998 and 2010 by publishers in the U.S., Philippines and Finland.  While Ms. Tabios writes in many forms and actually created a popular minimalist poetic form called the “hay(na)ku”, much of her work has been in prose poetry. The bulk of her first collection and recipient of the Philippines’ National Book Award for Poetry, Beyond Life Sentences (1998), and the entirety of her first U.S.-published book, Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole (2002), are prose poems. THE THORN ROSARY is co-published with Anvil Publishing of the Philippines.

Advance words for THE THORN ROSARY include:

Tabios is a seamstress of the surreal, combining erudition and art historical references with flourishes of verbal color and surge. She is a generous writer whose enthusiasm for art registers brightly in her energetic conceptions. Propositions make correlative folds in a vividness of amalgamation. Ramifications at the fringe of consciousness thread brocades of textural ardor in a luster of compound interest. Her work (to borrow one of her own phrases) is "a blissful difficulty," a quest akin to threading a letter with a metaphor, a perception with a nerve.
—John Olson, Backscatter: New and Selected Poems

THE THORN ROSARY includes an Introduction by its editor, poet-painter-scholar-critic Thomas Fink who concludes:

“When the prose poem’s aesthetic freedom took hold of Tabios in the mid- to late-nineties, she was not yet aware of how “Language Poets,” building on earlier work by such figures as Gertrude Stein and the John Ashbery of Three Poems, had developed new possibilities in this hybrid genre. She had yet to read, for example, Ron Silliman’s “The New Sentence,” and yet “Purity” and similar prose poems in this volume—had they existed in the eighties—could have served as excellent specimen texts for that crucial essay.

Tabios is probably the first Filipino/a poet to bring experimentally tinged post- and trans-colonial concerns to the genre of prose-poetry; specifically and uniquely, with the influence of abstract art, she disrupts ways in which narrative inherent in language acts as a colonizing tool. She also figures as one of the first Asian-American poets to publish work in this experimental vein.”

THE THORN ROSARY also includes an afterword by poet-scholar Joi Barrios who, in contextualizing Ms. Tabios within Filipino literature, notes:

"One could perhaps consider Eileen Tabios to be the Angela Manalang Gloria  of the 21st century, her poems all at once, crisp, flowing, interrogative, tender, innovative, funny, thought-provoking, sensuous, revolutionary.   Manalang Gloria (1907-1955), author of the collection simply entitled Poems, 1940, was known for her snapshot-like poems on unconventional women…

However, comparing Tabios with Manalang Gloria seems to be an exercise in stating the obvious.  This is similar to arguing that perhaps Tabios channels Jose Garcia Villa (and his comma poems) simply because she wrote The Secret Lives of Punctuations (2006).

Instead, in contextualizing Eileen Tabios' work, we could look into  the following:  Leona Florentino (1849-1884), the 19th-century Ilocano poet; the unanthologized Tagalog women poets who published in Liwayway and Taliba in the 1920s and 1930s, during the United States occupation of the Philippines (1899-1945);  and the binukot, the storyteller from Panay of pre-colonial Philippines. 

Tabios' poems seemingly speak of  love and desire, and yet are powerful statements that participate in discourses on gender, class, and power." 

PREVIOUSLY ON EILEEN R. TABIOS’ POETRY:

Jack Kerouac wrote, “Vision is deception.” Eileen Tabios’ version goes like this: “Go forth and prettily miscalculate.”
—The Brooklyn Rail

I once had a college classmate who was so exceptional as a student that our professor exclaimed, with tongue-in-cheek, that she could submit a paper with absolutely nothing written on it and still receive the highest grade. I can easily say the same for artist, poet, writer, and publisher Eileen R. Tabios. Of all of her admirable pursuits, it is her poetry that has proven her artistic worth. Her poems are transcendent, expressive, and provocative. What is more is that they are human, all too human to borrow from Nietzsche, in the emotions they evoke and in the wisdom they reflect.
—Philippine News

Important for …study in creative rhetorics or poetics, and as a most satisfying, pleasurable read
—Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics

Remarkable ability to move from the abstract and the intellectual to the sensual and the tangible
—Santa Rosa Press Democrat

Interrogates our imagination of the things made in this company town of a world by rethinking whatever it is we are pulling out of the box
—Rain Taxi

ABOUT EILEEN R. TABIOS

Eileen R. Tabios has released 18 print, four electronic and 1 CD poetry collections, an art essay collection, a poetry essay/interview anthology, a short story book and two novels.  In poetry, Ms. Tabios has crafted a body of work that is unique for melding ekphrasis with transcolonialism. Her poems have been translated into Spanish, Italian, Tagalog, Japanese, Portuguese, Polish, Greek, Paintings, Video, Drawings, Visual Poetry, Mixed Media Collages, Kali Martial Arts, Music, Modern Dance and Sculpture.   She’s also exhibited visual art and visual poetry in the United States and Asia, as well as edited or co-edited six  books of poetry, fiction and essays. She blogs as the “Chatelaine” at http://angelicpoker.blogspot.com and edits GALATEA RESURRECTS, a popular poetry review journal at http://galatearesurrects.blogspot.com

ISBN: 9780984117727 $19.95

Sample Poems

Corolla

Sometimes, I pray.  Love is always haggled before it becomes.  I clasp my hands around my disembodied truth: I am forever halved by edges—in group photos, on classroom seats, at mahogany dining tables whose lengths still fail to include me.  I play myself perfectly, containing a Catholic hell within my silence to preserve the consolation of hope.  Hope—once, I tipped Bing cherries into a blue bowl until I felt replete in the red overflow.

If my bones were hollow, like flutes made from reeds, I might savor the transcendence of Bach flowing through me rather than the fragile movement of marrow.  "These are thoughts which occur only to those entranced by the layered auras of decay," my mother scolds me.  I agree, but note the trend among artisans in sculpting prominent breasts on immobilized Virgin Marys.  She replies, "But these are moments lifted out of context."

The green calyx emphasizes the burden of generously-watered corollas, though beauty can be emphasized from an opposite perspective.  I have no use for calm seas, though I appreciate a delicadeza moonlight as much as any long-haired maiden.  You see, my people are always hungry with an insistence found only in virgins or fools.  It is my people's fate for focusing on reprieves instead of etched wrinkles on politicians' brows and mothers' cheeks.  We are uncomfortable encouraging dust to rise as tears.

Try witnessing pain as wine staining silk—a gray wing, then grey sky.  "Only God," I begin to whisper, before relenting to the tunes hummed by ladies with veiled eyes.  The definition of holidays becomes the temporary diminishment of hostile noise.  I do not wish to know what engenders fear from fathers, even if it means one must simulate an aging beauty queen clutching photos of tilted crowns.  I prefer to appreciate from a distance those points where land meets water: I prefer the position of an ignored chandelier.

When lucidity becomes too weighty, when the calyx sunders, I concede that I make decisions out of diluting my capacity for degradation.  I frequently camouflage my body into a Christmas tree.  I cannot afford to consider soot-faced children stumbling out of tunnels dug deep enough to plunge into China's womb.  You say the rice cooker is flirting with its lid; I say, I AM DROWNING IN AIR.  I have discovered the limitations of wantonness only in the act of listening.  There is no value in negative space without the intuitive grid.

I am called "Balikbayan" because the girl in me is a country of rope hammocks and waling-waling orchids—a land with irresistible gravity because, in it, I forget the world's magnificent indifference.  In this country, my grandmother's birthland, even the dead are never cold and I become a child at ease with trawling through rooms in the dark.  In this land, throughout this archipelago, I am capable of silencing afternoons with a finger.  In this country where citizens know better than to pick tomatoes green, smiling grandmothers unfurl my petals and begin the journey of pollen from anthers to ovary.  There, stigma transcends the mark of shame or grief to be the willing recipient of gold-rimmed pollen.  In my grandmother's country, votive lights are driven into dark cathedrals by the flames of la luna naranja, a blood-orange sun.


Purity

Once, the Greeks tolerated subjection to obviate chaos.  But an attitude of detachment is like anxiety—a flower in a glass prison.  So "the entire male population of Miletus was put to the sword and the women and children were sent into Asia as slaves."  I look up from the page into the dying days of the 21st century.  I am feeling the inhumanly fast beating of a woman's heart as she raises a rifle, then shoots a canvas with pellets of paint.  I am feeling a deer quicken its leaps.  The artist avoided the aftermath of wounds, but I see rubies.

After the fall of Miletus, the poet Phrynichos staged a drama about it.  But the play's performance was forbidden by Athenians who fined him "for reminding them of afflictions which affected them intimately."  I consider my search for unrelenting intimacy—a search I conduct despite my heart's cocoon of encaustic.  I consider how a grid is supposed to eliminate gesture from paint.  Although paint, finally, must return to its nature and flow like a menstruation—ooze with a viscous intensity unmitigated by geometry.

Though the Greeks would come to thwart the Persian invasion, I believe it noteworthy that such a victory belied intention.  The Greeks—like all of us, through all of time—first attempted compromise.  Now, encaustic fails and my heart looks me in the eye.  I am compelled to answer the many variations of the same question: Why do I weep before a square canvas depicting a square?  Or a circular canvas depicting a circle?  Have the Greeks attained purity?  Attained perfection?  Have I earned the moments I made my mother cry?