Eileen & Friends Read Books

This site presents readers on books they've enjoyed. Write-ups can be informal, formal, long, short, in any writing style--as long as the write-ups are hopefully helpful for  bringing attention to recommended books. Click on links below to go to reading notes. Please check back since this site will be updated over time with the addition of read books. Enjoy! Information for becoming one of Eileen's Friends HERE ! Read by Eileen Tabios 2024 Measures' Measures: Poetry & Knowledge   by Michael Boughn America is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan The Art Thief   by Michael Finkel METPO  by Scott MacLeod Wildflowers  by Beverly Parayno ABYSS AND SONG: Selected Poems  by George Sarantaris (Trans. from the Greek by Pria Luka) 2023 CLOSER TO LIBERATION: Pin[a/x/]y Activism in Theory and Practice . Editors Amanda Solomon Amorao, DJ Kuttin Kandi, and Jen Soriano BIBLIOLEPSY by Gina Apostol Kneel Said the Night by Margo Berdeshevsky All is Forgotten, Nothing is Los...

  Reading by Rev. Dr. T.C. Marshall Blood on the Fog  by Tongo Eisen-Martin (SF, City Lights, 2021) including interview material, by Dr. T.C. Marshall   BOOK LINK   Grounded in more than just another poetry scene, the works of San Francisco Poet Laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin have risen from a life of focused activism in resistance against racist state violence. His poetics developed in engagement, and his engagement with language is clearly part of that. To do the work of poetry in this way requires clear objectives but also an openness to the dialectical play of the real world. That play is stripped to its basics in an essay published at proteanmag.com in June, 2020, under the title “Alienation for my Peers”:   So what we have is normalized, institutionalized, legislated, and well-armed insanity that solidifies the position of the ruling class. And the only way to deal with this torrential insanity is with clear, sober, well-reasoned, theory-generated, praxis-tem...

 Reading by Eileen Tabios ABYSS AND SONG: Selected Poems by George Sarantaris Trans. from the Greek by Pria Luka (World Poetry Books, 2023) I’ve been aware of relatively new publisher World Poetry Books since its beginnings and its release of the first English collection of Greek modernist George Sarantaris, ABYSS AND SONG , affirms why I’m such a fan. An important role of any publisher is to make more known a particular author and I’d not heard of Sarantaris until this book. But I’ve been a fan of post-Classic Greek poetry since Odysseus Elytis who was among the handful of poets to leave an impression on me as a youngster, long before I turned a more focused eye on poetry in my mid-thirties. Indeed, I’d learn from the translator Pria Louka’s Introduction that Elytis was among Sarantaris’ “mentees”—that’s quite a Wow considering Elytis’ own poetry.  Sarantaris’ poems reveal the embeddedness of a specific Grecian sun I associate with the light over its seas (to the extent th...

 Reading by Eileen Tabios Measures' Measures: Poetry & Knowledge  by Michael Boughn  (Station Hill Press, 2024) It’s inevitable that I’ve read as well as read about Charles Olson—that’s partly what it means to be a poet in my (though not necessarily your) lifetime. But I haven’t paid attention to him in a long while until reading Michael Boughn’s new—and probably *needed*—book, MEASURE'S MEASURES: POETRY & KNOWLEDGE . Much has been said on the topics he covers—I replicate its Table of Contents below. But I want to share that as a Filipino poet practicing “Kapwa” as a poetics, I have always had an affinity for Olson’s world view (that “plural I” versus the “We”) even as I don’t see it as a contradiction to other ways of looking at poetry. The one immediate (pun intended, as you will see,) take-away from the book is the idea of speed as a means to transcend the banal or usual or boringly normative or, as Boughn articulates it better, “speed as a way of escaping the...

  Advance Look at review in  The Halo Halo Review T.C. MARSHALL Reviews   This is for the Mostless  by Jason Magabo-Perez  (Word Tech Editions, 2017)   BOOK LINK   So Good in English   This is for the Mostless  was a thrilling book to read. I almost held my breath as pages turned and revealed more and more great work. We find poems, narratives, anecdotes, investigations, considerations, memoirs, elegies, analyses, and more. The composition of the book, its components built of many pieces, leads us into a deep reading. Every true book of poetry teaches us how to read it. If that’s something we think we already know, well, we’ve got another think coming. Jason Magabo-Perez’s uses of form and content shape a book with simultaneous depth on both the “inside” of feeling experience and the “outside” angle of social analysis.  With him, the personal is most emphatically the political. I am very much looking forward to his next book, said t...

 Reading by Eileen Tabios America Is In The Heart  by Carlos Bulosan  (University of Washington Press, 1943 &1973-2002) I (re)read this classic Fil-Am novel as *homework-background* for my forthcoming novel  THE BALIKBAYAN ARTIST . Carlos Bulosan's  AMERICA IS IN THE HEART  is, of course, about the Manongs, the first wave of Filipino immigrants to primarily the U.S.' West Coast as cheap agricultural labor. Much has been said about this book but my recent reading's takeaway is how so much of the gentleness associated with Filipino nature was squeezed out brutally from individual Manongs as a result of the abuses inflicted on them. This book is supposed to be autobiography but one of its controversies is how Bulosan seemed to have experienced *EVERY* type of hurt experienced by Manongs (as fiction, it wouldn't surprise me if that aspect would be considered overblown or unbelievable by some). So it would be logical that some of the depicted Filipinos are n...

 Reading by Eileen Tabios METPO by Scott MacLeod (Serious Publications 40, Austin 2023) I’m now convinced Scott MacLeod is one of the finest writers of our time but perhaps his literary talents have been somewhat camouflaged by his focus on performance/conceptual/visual art. My latest read of his works,  METPO  (Russian for METRO), chronicles a trip he made to Eastern Europe with a focus on Moscow as part of a 2.5-month tour presenting his performance art. It is charismatic writing due to pulling off one of the most difficult styles in writing: atmospheric writing. Reading his passages on trains made me recall my own visit to Russia—at about the same time, it seems, which was when last century was coughing to an end—and which also included a long train ride from Moscow to Siberia when I became increasingly choked by cigarette smoke and Pushkin recitations as the night unfolded.  METPO  is poet’s writing as memory and descriptions can’t help but lapse to lyricis...

 Reading by Eileen Tabios The Art Thief by Michael Finkelstein (Knopf, 2023) Michael Finkel’s The Art Thief is a fascinating account of Stéphane Breitwieser , one of the most successful art thieves in history. What makes the book wonderful reading is how this experienced writer integrates art-related matters (see excerpt below on art beating Darwinian war) which are just as interesting as the art thief’s improbable life. This is a successful literary technique that’s usual in poetry but cuts across genres—this relating the subject matter to other topics. In fact, I learned about “Stendahl syndrome” from this book and ended up incorporating references to it in my novel-in-progress CONVERSATION WITH ECHO . Such interconnectedness is also logical because it exemplifies as well as affirms Kapwa.

  Reading by Eileen Tabios Wildflowers  by Beverly Parayno (PAWA, 2023)   I was going to say Beverly Parayno’s debut book  WILDFLOWERS  (  http://wildflowersbp.com  ) is the best short story collection I’ve read this year… but the year obviously just got started (it’s Jan. 8 as I write this). So below is the list of short story/flash fiction collections I read in 2023. And I’ll say that with its elegantly meticulous—even refined—style that provides a master class in the open-ended ending, WILDFLOWERS is as stellar as any title below. Its occasional epistemological forays bespeak a more mature writer than might be indicated by a first book author. And its discernible punk muscle is amusing. This author, thus, can be considered a peer with the likes of Grynberg, Rosca, Galang, Remoto and Sesling—what a feat. Well then: I welcome Beverly to the authors' party.  WILDFLOWERS  is a superb achievement.   * For comparison, the 2023 short story/...