Ahadada Books (Toronto & Tokyo) is pleased to announce the release of Eileen R. Tabios' 16th print poetry collection, NOTA BENE EISWEIN. In this book, 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' 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. Tabios blogs as the "Chatelaine" and edits GALATEA RESURRECTS, a popular poetry review journal.
To celebrate the release of NOTA BENE EISWEIN, Ahadada Books is pleased to announce a SPECIAL RELEASE OFFER. For orders received through February 28, 2009, the book will be available at a 25% discount for $12.00. There will be free shipping as well to U.S. residents. Eileen will be processing U.S.-based orders (which means you can get a signed copy!), so you can order by sending a check made out to "Eileen Tabios" to
Eileen Tabios
256 North Fork Crystal Springs Rd.
St. Helena, CA 94574
U.S.A.
If non-U.S. residents are interested in this offer, please contact Ahadada Books through Ahadada — we are offering free shipping to residents of Canada, as well! To pre-order, send an email to us through this contact form!
If non-U.S. residents wish a signed copy, you can email the author directly by clicking here to confirm logistics of international shipment.
About Eileen Tabios
Eileen Tabios (born 1960) is an award-winning Filipino-American poet, fiction writer, conceptual/visual artist, editor, anthologist, critic, and publisher. Born in Ilocos Sur, Philippines, Tabios moved to the United States at the age of ten. She holds a B.A. in political science from Barnard College and a M.B.A. in economics and international business from New York University Graduate School of Business. Her last corporate career was involved with international project finance. She began to write poetry in 1995.
What others say about Eileen Tabios
Her poems allow our 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 captivating, utterly original imagination. In her lines, which are at once strict and sensual, Eileen Tabios inserts stingers barbed with wit and political incisiveness. The crisp, almost scientific clarity of her syntax is relentlessly undermined by fabulous leaps from sentence to sentence, by paradox, radical juxtaposition, lurking sexual innuendo, and unpredictable narrative swerve. Hers is a poetics of social and cultural interrogation in which she succeeds in uniting what she would call "the convex with the concave." Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole will stand you straight up.
—Forrest Gander
How often do you come across language so lavishly expansive that any description you can think of seems laughably one-sided? Better just to slap a warning label on it: "Danger: Contents combustible on contact with reading. Includes poems so fired up they'll sear your fingerprints off as you feel your way through them (instant identity loss). Others brilliant enough to burn after images into your retina. Handle recklessly if at all.
—Barry Schwabsky
"And what is seeing?" asks Eileen Tabios, in this volume of prose meditations on travel, eros, art, and innumerable other subjects, objects. Tabios' answers--her seeings--come out of an amazing range of references, from Buddha to Salman Rushdie to Anais Nin to Anne Truitt to a nameless investment banker; from the Ancients to the Romantics to the Moderns and back again; from the Philippines, as from the United States. Through it all, reader and writer find themselves "losing uncertainty" through Tabios' "eroticized history," which earns its final exclamation, "worthy is the price: Yes!"
—Susan M. Schultz
