Eileen R. Tabios says, “Poetry is a decolonized language.” She proves it through her autobiography that begins with her first book that she wrote as a 2–3-year-old toddler and focuses on her poetry inventions: the hay(na)ku, the Murder Death Resurrection Poetry Generator, and the Flooid. This is a unique and thought-provoking autobiography by a poet who claims poetry is not words.

“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.” –T.C. Marshall, The Halo-Halo Review