Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

 (Loveland, OH: Dos Madres Press, 2015), ISBN: 978-1-939929-36-5 The arrival of a new Eileen Tabios book has become no less than an Event for me. Not only is it inspiring to see what new forms and source material this award-winning and prolific poet and editor is working with and drawing from, but it inevitably leads to my own experimentation with whatever creative works I am bringing to life at the time. Tabios is very much a writer’s writer, and one of the leading poet-practitioners in the realm of how to make the reader participatory with the experience. In essence, Tabios is such a writer’s writer that she wants everyone to be, if not a writer, than certainly an active author of their own experience and engagement. This is an aspiration that is beyond resonant with me as an artist, mentor, and storyteller. When Invent[st]ory: Selected Catalog Poems & New (1996–2015) arrived I was particularly enthused, as I have not read/reviewed anything of Tabios’s prior to 201...

(New York: theenk Books, 2013, ISBN: 978-0-9647342-8-9) Going to the mailbox and finding the latest book by Eileen Tabios is always a treat for me. Of all the poets and writers of poetry I have been blessed enough to know over the past two decades, none provokes thought and inspiration more than she. Eileen is a pioneer, inventing new forms such as the hay(na)ku, and always adding in some essays or other notes into her collections. In the end, I always feel like I have gotten just that little bit more from her and her work than “just” poems. In The Awakening , we get a little bit of lots of things, so if you’ve yet to read Eileen’s work, this is an excellent place to start. In less than 60 pages, she gives us a long poem on the sexual (mis)adventures of some of history’s best-known painters, as framed through the medical work of the poet and MD William Carlos Williams. We then move on to an offering of emails sent and received on September 11, 2001, that ...

Chatelaine (chain)—A set of short chains on a belt worn by women and men for carrying keys, thimble and/or sewing kit, etc. (from Wikipedia) “Kapwa”—a Filipino cultural concept of interconnectedness whereby other people are not “others” but part of what one is. (from the opening page; emphasis in original) How does one get to truly know the artist? Especially when the one doing the searching is the artist her- or himself? Dostoyevsky and Freud put forth the notion that it is impossible for an autobiography to reveal the Truth because of our penchant for self-delusion and both positive and negative exaggeration. Aldous Huxley seemed to agree, saying: “there is never a one-to-one correspondence between an author’s work and his character.” If poetry, like all writing, is a form of autobiography, then the path to the Truth is lined with thorns and nails and broken glass, at the end of which are myriad locks. The Blind Chatelaine’s Keys is a collection of reviews of many of Eileen Tabios’ b...