Well, I got my copy and it's beautiful. Perhaps you'll be interested, too, in reading through my latest book -- AGAINST MISANTHROPY: A LIFE IN POETRY (2015-1995). I share the publisher's book description below ... but I should also say something about the form, to wit:
This is my fifth book that tinkers with, if not subverts, the form of autobiography and biography.* I use disparate elements like blurbs, interviews, essays, poems as well as a paper on me written by Mom that I discovered two years after she passed. If a reader ever chose to read this book straight-through from beginning to end, a profile surfaces and that could be "Eileen R. Tabios." Of course, only my stalkers may be interested in going through this exercise, but I'ma just sayin'.... And here's why I'ma sayin' that, to quote from an interview-in-progress:
Disrupting the (traditional) form and genre of autobiography and
biography is one of my interests, primarily because it amuses me. But there’s certainly many reasons why one
(or I) desires to disrupt auto/biography—from the general factors of how one
may or may not ever know the true story, how one elides the true story, and how
I believe identity is both constrained by inherited circumstances as well as
fluctuates such that any life story narrative is at best a snapshot narrative
rather than something that can hold true over time. I call these “general” factors because they
can apply to everybody, thus how *knowing one’s self* is one of the most
difficult goals to achieve.
But then when, in my case, one is forced to grapple with
immigration, diaspora, minority/POC positionings in the land where the
migratory transplant ends, then the memoir, by being a genre that posits it can
present an accurate life story, becomes a landscape fertile for
disruption.
For now, here's info from publisher's release of the book:
2015 marks the 20th year anniversary of Eileen R.
Tabios’ “career switch” from banking to poetry.
AGAINST MISANTHROPY presents
her life as a self-educated poet—from, as a newbie poet, reading through all of
the poetry books of her local Barnes and Noble as she scratched her head over
what poetry is supposed to be … to more recently creating a poetry generator
capable of making poems without additional authorial intervention. Along her journey, she also released about 30
poetry collections, two fiction books and four prose collections with the help
of publishers in eight countries.
Ultimately, however, her so far 20-year poetry journey has taught her
that poetry’s greatest gift is the means by which to forge a new life as a
better person. As one of her Facebook
friends Maxwell Clark told her, and she agrees, “The best person is the best
poet.”
Excerpts from AGAINST MISANTHROPY:
I think the human race is on a suicide path.…where are the
moments of joy, of beauty, of grace within this doomsday path humans are on?
From where or how do we come up with reasons that make it worthwhile to
continue living? To rush out of our beds to greet the day? To smile? To laugh?
Well, for me, these moments would occur through the positive interactions made
possible by love and respect for other people, creatures and the environment….I
look at these moments, and if I bear in mind my own apocalyptic forecast for
the human race, I view these moments—the stubbornness
of their continued existence against all odds—as poetry in the sense that
poetry's task is not to affirm the (unjust) status quo but to disrupt it.
—from ARDUITY’s Interview of Eileen R. Tabios
...the moment, the space, from which I attempt to create
poems. In the indigenous myth, the human, by being rooted onto the planet but
also touching the sky, is connected to everything in the universe and across
all time, including that the human is rooted to the past and future—indeed,
there is no unfolding of time. In that moment, all of existence—past, present
and future—has coalesced into a singular moment, a single gem with an infinite
expanse. In that moment, were I that human, I am connected to everything so
that there is nothing or no one I do not know. I am everyone and everything,
and everything and everyone is me. In that moment, to paraphrase something I
once I heard from some Buddhist, German or French philosopher, or Star Trek
character, “No one or nothing is alien to me."
—from Eileen R.
Tabios’ “Babaylan Poetics”
Ordering info from BlazeVOX and Amazon HERE.
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*The other four books are I TAKE THEE, ENGLISH, FOR MY BELOVED (2005), THE LIGHT SANG AS IT LEFT YOUR EYES: OUR AUTOBIOGRAPHY (2007); SILENCES: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LOSS (2007); and THE BLIND CHATELAINE'S KEYS (2008).
