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Silk Egg: Collected Novels
Fiction. Asian American Studies. "The genius of Eileen R. Tabios is as generous as it is manifold. Reading SILK EGG, I suddenly feel myself becoming more perceptive, fantastical, mordant, impassioned, and artful. Just like the book itself. Read it, and the same can happen to you"—Barry Schwabsky.
132 pages, Paperback
First published January 15, 2011
About the author
Eileen R. Tabios
60 books16 followersEileen 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 an 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.
Tabios has released eighteen print, four electronic, one CD poetry collections, an art essay collection, a poetry essay/interview anthology, a novel, and a short story book. Tabios has created a body of work melding transcolonialism with ekphrasis. Inventor of the poetic form called "hay(na)ku," she has had her poems translated into Spanish, Tagalog, Japanese, Italian, Paintings, Video, Drawings, Visual Poetry, Mixed Media Collages, Kali Martial Arts, Modern Dance and Sculpture.
Tabios has edited or co-edited five books of poetry, fiction and essays released in the United States. She also founded and edits the poetry review journal, "GALATEA RESURRECTS, a Poetry Engagement".
She is the founder of Meritage Press, a multidisciplinary literary and arts press based in St. Helena, California.
In addition to recipient of the Philippines’ National Book Award for Poetry, her poetry and editing projects have also received numerous awards including the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, The Potrero Nuevo Fund Prize, the Gustavus Meyers Outstanding Book Award in the Advancement of Human Rights, Foreword Magazine Anthology of the Year Award, Poet Magazine's Iva Mary Williams Poetry Award, Judds Hill's Annual Poetry Prize and the Philippine American Writers & Artists’ Catalagan Award; recognition from the Academy of American Poets, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association and the PEN/Open Book Committee; as well as grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation, National Endowment of the Arts, the New York State Council on the Humanities, the California Council for the Humanities, and the New York City Downtown Cultural Council.
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 an 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.
Tabios has released eighteen print, four electronic, one CD poetry collections, an art essay collection, a poetry essay/interview anthology, a novel, and a short story book. Tabios has created a body of work melding transcolonialism with ekphrasis. Inventor of the poetic form called "hay(na)ku," she has had her poems translated into Spanish, Tagalog, Japanese, Italian, Paintings, Video, Drawings, Visual Poetry, Mixed Media Collages, Kali Martial Arts, Modern Dance and Sculpture.
Tabios has edited or co-edited five books of poetry, fiction and essays released in the United States. She also founded and edits the poetry review journal, "GALATEA RESURRECTS, a Poetry Engagement".
She is the founder of Meritage Press, a multidisciplinary literary and arts press based in St. Helena, California.
In addition to recipient of the Philippines’ National Book Award for Poetry, her poetry and editing projects have also received numerous awards including the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, The Potrero Nuevo Fund Prize, the Gustavus Meyers Outstanding Book Award in the Advancement of Human Rights, Foreword Magazine Anthology of the Year Award, Poet Magazine's Iva Mary Williams Poetry Award, Judds Hill's Annual Poetry Prize and the Philippine American Writers & Artists’ Catalagan Award; recognition from the Academy of American Poets, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association and the PEN/Open Book Committee; as well as grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation, National Endowment of the Arts, the New York State Council on the Humanities, the California Council for the Humanities, and the New York City Downtown Cultural Council.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 9, 2011
Words and the Source of Creativity
Eileen R. Tabios continues to startle us with every publication she creates. Her mind must work like a finely turned kaleidoscope, every movement she makes results in something new, something we hadn't expected, something that starts our brains working in different ways. For this reader (and admittedly a devoted fan) her invention of the poetic form of hay(na)ku seemed a springboard from which many further works would sprout. But Tabios is ever on the watch for the novel (meaning of course the new) and just as has happened in this sentence, her explorations have resulted - for the time being - in this fascinating collection of 'novels' she presents as SILK EGG.
An introduction that can only be described as a journey into the surreal explains that she spent time in the Library of Babel belonging to Jorge Luis Borges which she shares is the source of the ideas for all of these novels. What this book contains are 'novels', each containing seven chapters and each chapter confined to one page - and only a few lines on that page to boot! But oh how she manages to toss words in the air and have them settle into dream like episodes that could easily being with an inhalation on an opium pipe! Example, form the novel titled DEAR CLOUD:
Chapter I
Clouds, a poet's mother called them"puffballs." Soft
cotton balls. How can something so soft be dangerous when
contextualized under X-ray to be interruption of bone?
Chapter II
Her mirrors hear many thoughts unspoken to others.
Like, "What does it mean that Daddy had to die before I
could become big enough to be a parent?"
skip to Chapter VI
A "puffball" killed my father. A white cloud as soft as his
daughter who nonetheless also killed him.
Where is the comfort to your whispered, "Life causes
death"?
And so flows the magic and challenge of Eileen R. Tabios. She takes us places simply by sculpting words in unfamiliar ways - places we would have never found without her lamp. She continues to be a joy and one of the most creative artists of words around.
Grady Harp
Eileen R. Tabios continues to startle us with every publication she creates. Her mind must work like a finely turned kaleidoscope, every movement she makes results in something new, something we hadn't expected, something that starts our brains working in different ways. For this reader (and admittedly a devoted fan) her invention of the poetic form of hay(na)ku seemed a springboard from which many further works would sprout. But Tabios is ever on the watch for the novel (meaning of course the new) and just as has happened in this sentence, her explorations have resulted - for the time being - in this fascinating collection of 'novels' she presents as SILK EGG.
An introduction that can only be described as a journey into the surreal explains that she spent time in the Library of Babel belonging to Jorge Luis Borges which she shares is the source of the ideas for all of these novels. What this book contains are 'novels', each containing seven chapters and each chapter confined to one page - and only a few lines on that page to boot! But oh how she manages to toss words in the air and have them settle into dream like episodes that could easily being with an inhalation on an opium pipe! Example, form the novel titled DEAR CLOUD:
Chapter I
Clouds, a poet's mother called them"puffballs." Soft
cotton balls. How can something so soft be dangerous when
contextualized under X-ray to be interruption of bone?
Chapter II
Her mirrors hear many thoughts unspoken to others.
Like, "What does it mean that Daddy had to die before I
could become big enough to be a parent?"
skip to Chapter VI
A "puffball" killed my father. A white cloud as soft as his
daughter who nonetheless also killed him.
Where is the comfort to your whispered, "Life causes
death"?
And so flows the magic and challenge of Eileen R. Tabios. She takes us places simply by sculpting words in unfamiliar ways - places we would have never found without her lamp. She continues to be a joy and one of the most creative artists of words around.
Grady Harp
March 6, 2017
“The dart sliced the orchid before the target fell.” This sentence from one of the “novels” collected here by Eileen Tabios represents the impetus of her authorial intent, which in her previous works she said transcends through text. The target is the reader enthused in reading poetry and in patronizing verses infused with brevity yet promising a thought-provoking circumstance in the reading act.
However, Silk Egg, as asserted by the author herself in her notes on the book’s back cover, is not an anthology of verses, nor a garden of words longing for organic unity and critical consideration. It is, more than anything else, a work of prose fictions obviating a reader’s occasional slippages.
The orchids are sliced before the reader could savor the taste of the text, as the estrangement prevailing in the textual presentation makes one realize that reading Tabios’s oeuvres are not the rightful owners of passive and superficial readings. Universal soundings are put to the test.
Is this a novel? You might murmur to yourself while reading the eponymous novel Silk Egg for this preempts to you of what you would witness in the entire book. “A frozen fist.” Yours is the interpretative response. You are urged to think, to imagine the scene, given the colors, textures, and shapes of objects lingering in temporal memory. However, this total cooperation with the novel’s textuality places you in confusion bordering on rage over your own incomprehension.
“Here and there, depending on the shifting light, glass panes revealed thin, gold veins.” Tabios in her literature, needless to say, wiggles the blanket out of each cage so that the mellifluous sounds of birds thirsting for liberty and uncompromised flight are heard, enjoyed, loved. She permits the reader to explore her texts in all ways imaginable. She loosens her bracelet and “watch jade penetrate water, its wake to be defined by moss.”
In this collection of 12 novels contained in a 130-page paperback, all of them were written with strong imageries and expressed in prose without losing calibrated lyricism. All works defy logic and serve as mosaic dramas leading to numerous interpretations and implications. Fragments, one should say sentences, are laid on the blank page and given new tones and schemes. In Dear Cloud, Tabios started asking the question “How can something so soft be dangerous?” and the last line of the seventh and last chapter declared: “I force myself to smile at the cloud.” What is between these sentences is the reader’s obligation, as if the reader is moved by the scarcity of descriptors and settings present in most of the novels and short stories.
In Modern Tulips, the philosopher (referred by Tabios as Slavoj Zizek) asked the reader in the third chapter “Can the flower feel the edge of scissors against its stalk?” We might not know the answer to that intriguing inquiry. But what’s left with us is the stirring moment, looking at a direction where we are headed. It is Gemino Abad who said that to “question” is to embark on a “quest”.
Fiction is not only an exposition of what transpired in a universe, in parallel universes, or in multiverses. Fiction throws a question, like how a pebble is tossed while absconding sunlight’s geometry, then allows the reader to reflect on the pebble’s chiaroscuro. In that moment of introspection, the reader is enabled to create his own narrative, a story he should not bear the burden of explaining its subtexts. Tabios, suffice it to say, is a poet, as well as a fictionist, of regenerations, and not regimentations.
A dialogue between a man and woman. A slice of breath released on the canvas. Wine swiveled in a decanter which light reflects on frescoes. An assortment of velvet red ribbons. There’s a lot more of these “beautiful mysteries” in reading Silk Egg, a compilation of novels that defy measures established by scribes incognizant of the beauty of brevity and the freedom in responding to art. If her poetry reverberates pulchritude in rhythm and restrictiveness, Tabios’s fiction challenges a novel’s typical length, proving that every line, space, and punctuation can speak of a narrative some writers’ unapologetic verbosity cannot provide in clarity and grandeur.
However, Silk Egg, as asserted by the author herself in her notes on the book’s back cover, is not an anthology of verses, nor a garden of words longing for organic unity and critical consideration. It is, more than anything else, a work of prose fictions obviating a reader’s occasional slippages.
The orchids are sliced before the reader could savor the taste of the text, as the estrangement prevailing in the textual presentation makes one realize that reading Tabios’s oeuvres are not the rightful owners of passive and superficial readings. Universal soundings are put to the test.
Is this a novel? You might murmur to yourself while reading the eponymous novel Silk Egg for this preempts to you of what you would witness in the entire book. “A frozen fist.” Yours is the interpretative response. You are urged to think, to imagine the scene, given the colors, textures, and shapes of objects lingering in temporal memory. However, this total cooperation with the novel’s textuality places you in confusion bordering on rage over your own incomprehension.
“Here and there, depending on the shifting light, glass panes revealed thin, gold veins.” Tabios in her literature, needless to say, wiggles the blanket out of each cage so that the mellifluous sounds of birds thirsting for liberty and uncompromised flight are heard, enjoyed, loved. She permits the reader to explore her texts in all ways imaginable. She loosens her bracelet and “watch jade penetrate water, its wake to be defined by moss.”
In this collection of 12 novels contained in a 130-page paperback, all of them were written with strong imageries and expressed in prose without losing calibrated lyricism. All works defy logic and serve as mosaic dramas leading to numerous interpretations and implications. Fragments, one should say sentences, are laid on the blank page and given new tones and schemes. In Dear Cloud, Tabios started asking the question “How can something so soft be dangerous?” and the last line of the seventh and last chapter declared: “I force myself to smile at the cloud.” What is between these sentences is the reader’s obligation, as if the reader is moved by the scarcity of descriptors and settings present in most of the novels and short stories.
In Modern Tulips, the philosopher (referred by Tabios as Slavoj Zizek) asked the reader in the third chapter “Can the flower feel the edge of scissors against its stalk?” We might not know the answer to that intriguing inquiry. But what’s left with us is the stirring moment, looking at a direction where we are headed. It is Gemino Abad who said that to “question” is to embark on a “quest”.
Fiction is not only an exposition of what transpired in a universe, in parallel universes, or in multiverses. Fiction throws a question, like how a pebble is tossed while absconding sunlight’s geometry, then allows the reader to reflect on the pebble’s chiaroscuro. In that moment of introspection, the reader is enabled to create his own narrative, a story he should not bear the burden of explaining its subtexts. Tabios, suffice it to say, is a poet, as well as a fictionist, of regenerations, and not regimentations.
A dialogue between a man and woman. A slice of breath released on the canvas. Wine swiveled in a decanter which light reflects on frescoes. An assortment of velvet red ribbons. There’s a lot more of these “beautiful mysteries” in reading Silk Egg, a compilation of novels that defy measures established by scribes incognizant of the beauty of brevity and the freedom in responding to art. If her poetry reverberates pulchritude in rhythm and restrictiveness, Tabios’s fiction challenges a novel’s typical length, proving that every line, space, and punctuation can speak of a narrative some writers’ unapologetic verbosity cannot provide in clarity and grandeur.
February 19, 2016
Review by Aileen Cassinetto
Silk Egg begins, like much of Eileen Tabios' work, with "the most infinitesimal hint of light." There are 12 short novels in this collection, each one with seven chapters. In her book description, Tabios admits to spilling d'Yquem on a limestone windowsill on the 7th floor of Jorge Luis Borges' library of Babel — which she proceeded to erase with a bottle of Ajax. Now, all this may sound confusing, at first, but the narrator is a playful, illumined guide in a Borgesian universe. The novels, taken individually, are self-contained and carefully layered; taken together, they form a hexagonal pyramid — each novel an edge, each chapter a vertice.
Much of the novel's narrative focus is drawn from mood and complex ideas.
And it is very tempting to approach it from a deconstuctivist perspective — i.e. the Borgesian labyrinth seeming to give rise to the Tabios pyramid, to borrow from architect and theorist Bernard Tschumi.
Continuing the topological thread, Tabios writes of:
"silk walls of a pale blue"
"the irrelevance of ribbons"
A pewter sea.
A shirt woven from hummingbird wings
[and of] air [that] bears no grudges
Muted as they are, these images rouse the tenderest of sentiments over the impermanence of structures. That is to say, the perception of impermanence as directed by experience (or is it the other way around?). Architectural paradoxes aside, the significance of these novels is to present a new way of texturizing orthographical symbols and their meanings using as few combinations as possible. As Tabios puts it, "Look where the window view finally stops…" and/or see the world with words. That is again to say, dare to perceive, represent, truthfully.
Silk Egg begins, like much of Eileen Tabios' work, with "the most infinitesimal hint of light." There are 12 short novels in this collection, each one with seven chapters. In her book description, Tabios admits to spilling d'Yquem on a limestone windowsill on the 7th floor of Jorge Luis Borges' library of Babel — which she proceeded to erase with a bottle of Ajax. Now, all this may sound confusing, at first, but the narrator is a playful, illumined guide in a Borgesian universe. The novels, taken individually, are self-contained and carefully layered; taken together, they form a hexagonal pyramid — each novel an edge, each chapter a vertice.
Much of the novel's narrative focus is drawn from mood and complex ideas.
And it is very tempting to approach it from a deconstuctivist perspective — i.e. the Borgesian labyrinth seeming to give rise to the Tabios pyramid, to borrow from architect and theorist Bernard Tschumi.
Continuing the topological thread, Tabios writes of:
"silk walls of a pale blue"
"the irrelevance of ribbons"
A pewter sea.
A shirt woven from hummingbird wings
[and of] air [that] bears no grudges
Muted as they are, these images rouse the tenderest of sentiments over the impermanence of structures. That is to say, the perception of impermanence as directed by experience (or is it the other way around?). Architectural paradoxes aside, the significance of these novels is to present a new way of texturizing orthographical symbols and their meanings using as few combinations as possible. As Tabios puts it, "Look where the window view finally stops…" and/or see the world with words. That is again to say, dare to perceive, represent, truthfully.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews