Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole: Poems by Eileen R. Tabios

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Autographed Copy

Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole is the first U.S. collection by Eileen R. Tabios, winner of the Philippines' National Book Award for Poetry. "Her poems allows out 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 captivation, utterly original imagination. In her lines, which are at once strict and sensual, Eileen Tabios inserts stingers barbed with wit and political incisiveness. Hers is a poetics of social and cultural interrogation in which she succeeds in uniting what she would call the 'covex with the concave.' REPRODUCTIONS OF THE EMPTY FLAGPOLE will stand you straight up"-Forrest Gander.
From Publishers Weekly. In her first collection of poetry to be published in the United States, Tabios, a recipient of the Philippines' National Book Award and the editor of such anthologies such as Black Lightning: Poetry in Progress and Babaylan: An Anthology of Filipina and Filipina American Writers, explores how the colonizing language both obviously and not-so-obviously alters expression, experience and perception. Tabios begins the book with a selection of ekphratic poems inspired by ancient Greek sculptures, introducing the complex issues of cultural and linguistic domination that are to play such a large part in the long central section, titled "Returning the Borrowed Tongue." Her prose-poems balance (at times uncomfortably) on the much-contested border between "prose" and "poetry," just as the pieces themselves explore the murky boundaries between colonization and identity. Tabios investigates sensual and personal histories, conjuring subtle games of domination and submission against a backdrop of physical dislocation and echoing the conundrums of a colonized land: "The past depends on how we control memory. Memory is a controlling agent. No one can discover what lies beyond an image without the progress of light. Fearlessly, hands reach forth to turn the vase around for another view. The blue vein leaps against the pale hide of a wrist encircled by a thin strand of gold. And your finger is tracing a vein, its protrusion helpless." The book closes with an ornate triptych dedicated to Anne Truitt that exposes Tabios's search through history and art to understand her central demands-to perceive freely, to investigate color, to be a fully responsive being. "Can you pay the price for risking perception and imperceptibility?" she asks in "The Continuance of the Gaze," and then answers, "I trust in radiance. Let: Us."

Paperback: 124 pages
Publisher: Marsh Hawk Press; 1st edition (January 1, 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 097133328-9
ISBN-13: 978-09-7-133328-4
Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.5 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces