Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole

by Eileen R. Tabios

Poetry. REPRODUCTIONS OF THE EMPTY FLAGPOLE is the first U.S. collection by Eileen R. Tabios, winner of the Phillipines' 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.

Genres: Poetry

124 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2002

About the author

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 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.

Reviews

[McKenzie Richardson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good collection of poetry. The poems are very descriptive and often evoke beautiful images. The book is broken down into three sections, which designate the themes of the poems included, such as the Greek inspiration of the poems in the section, My Greece. This book took me a while to get through, because it is not poetry that you can rush through and read back-to-back. The heaviness of each poem is best reach alone first, giving time to fully digest it before moving on to the next. Written as free form poetry in paragraph form, it is not necessarily the words themselves that are beautiful, but the combination of them that really creates meaning in the poems.