SOMEONE REMEMBERS AMNESIA!

Delighted by this new review of AMNESIA: Somebody's Memoir -- by Dina Paulson-McEwen at WALK THE LINE. The review is HERE, but here's an excerpt:

The content unites through anaphora, with nearly all lines beginning “I forgot…” (when Tabios deviates [i.e. “I. Forgot.”] it zaps the eye). There is interplay between personal, earthly, and political; between who is ‘you’ and who is ‘me’ as one remembers and forgets. She coyly states: “I forgot the logic of amnesia.” For the reader, presented with language repetition, learning moves rapidly into forgotten facticity. The book, at first reading, is already a second reading. 

AMNESIA: Somebody’s Memoir is equally about content and form and their possibilities of convergence: how language decries and rejuvenates what it observes, exposing an x-ray of has-beens and to-be’s. 

The book also comprises actual science. AMNESIA: Somebody’s Memoir is one of six books generated by her “The MDR [Murder, Death and Resurrection] Poetry Generator.” A database of her poetry, it has over three thousand possibilities of poems. The MDR Poetry Generator recalls indigenous Filipino practices, which Tabios refers to as “Babaylan Poetics.”  

Two forces occur here. A flow allows the individual to be present and reconcile on their own terms. A mechanization bases on recycled data, suppressing original thinking. An individual must parse through this stratum, push to investigate themselves and to piece together/pierce the world. As in: “I forgot the wave–how its singularity is easily fractured by sunlight’s blades.”