Because I Love You, I Become War

Poems and Uncollected Poetics Prose by Eileen R. Tabios

Publisher: Marsh Hawk Press

Release Date: 2023
ISBN: 978-0-9986582-6-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022052614
Price: $22.00
Pages: 332

Distributors: Bookshop, Bookshop(2nd link), Amazon, Ebay, Bird & Beckett Books & Records (San Francisco), Abe Books, among others.

BOOK DESCRIPTION

BECAUSE I LOVE YOU, I BECOME WAR is Eileen R. Tabios’ book-length love poem to a world in turmoil. She dedicates it to “those who are fighting against the planet’s current great ailments: environmental damage and economic/political oligarchism.” Poems address war, environmental havoc, women and their concerns throughout history, poetics, political science, immigration and diaspora, oligarchism, dictatorships, the limits of language, among others. The prose, culled from the past two decades, presents essays, speeches, reviews, and letters that address the author’s poetic concerns as well as a daily writing prompt, expanding the form of the novel, Methodism, homages to literary figures, and the author’s “First Book.” Its treasures include an adobo poem as never before conceptualized, as well as a letter of recommendation for a visual artist for the year 2021 when the Philippines refused to designate a National Artist for Visual Arts. The book ends with a postscript of poems on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As a whole, the book (re)presents a polymathic perspective on how love faces injustice, as contextualized by the Filipino indigenous trait of “kapwa” which posits that everything is interconnected.

ADVANCE WORDS

Since her first works, Eileen Tabios’ performances—in prose, poetic artifices, and mixed constructions or inventions—have always sharpened the cutting-edge of contemporary global cultural events. Art has morphed into a dazzling multiverse of sensuous happenings. Undoing the conceptual habit of reframing and parodic mimicry, she has created a new form of  montage in texts such as “Because I Love you, I Become War” and “President Duterte Socializes Media,” etc.—witty humor jostling with sharp critique and graceful Spieltrieb.  Enjoy in this volume the exercise of a rare intelligence that weaves the semiotic subtleties of icon, index, and symbol into epiphanies and discoveries that are, indeed, new additions to our world as we know it so far.
—E. San Juan, Jr., author of Sisa’s Vengeance and Maelstrom over the Killing Fields

Raw[ness] exudes from this collection of poems and poetics prose about love and war, both corporal and terrestrial. Whether speaking of “rose petals yawning like little girls, like the daughters I never bore,” or a California wildfire’s “yellowed skies” and “smoke taint,” even color is narrative in Eileen Tabios’ dexterous hands. Prose serves as the underpainting, outlining recurring themes that emerge in Tabios’ writings of women and women’s bodies as loci of war and of creation; of poetry and teaching as social and political activism. In the section “Political Science,” Tabios’ Motherland, the Philippines, is a battlefield where the personas of journalist Maria Ressa and presidential contender Leni [Robredo] are pitted in a balagtasan against the persona of macho-fascist [Rodrigo Roa] Duterte. “The Great Grief” section rises from the battlefield of Mother Earth with elegies on a world on fire; a cactus’ “Interior as dry / As the cracked sod surrounding / You, for whom no one sheds tears”; songbirds’ “corpses hitting ground.” Eileen Tabios is a poet with a finger on the pulse of humanity, and her poems are proof of its resilience even in these grave times.
—Vina Orden, Writer, Editor, co-host of The Lift Up podcast, and Immigrants’ and Human Rights Advocate

Near the beginning of “Water as Poetics as Identity”, one of the prose pieces in this book, are the assertions “The best poems, for me, are not about something. They become/are that something.” This book does something better; it transcends the dichotomy implied by those sentences. Each piece in it is definitely about something, and each definitely issomething. The same can be said about prose in the second half of the book. This, for me, is when Eileen-the-maker-of language-things is at her best. Because you know where she’s at, and she is down to the bone (tip of the cap for that phraseology to the great East Bay Grease band, Cold Blood. Before your time, Eileen …). Just like the world. When it’s down to the bone the only art that matters is art that can look it all in the face and say, “I measure up.” And be dead on about that. Art that matters can be found on nearly every page of BECAUSE I LOVE YOU, I BECOME WAR. This book is by a mature artist at the height of her power—a book that is a gift.
—author/curator of the Zeitgeist Spam series, associate editor of Poetry of the Americas: A Transnational Anthology (eds. Jerome Rothenberg & Javier Taboada), and editor of Collected Poems of Anselm Hollo with Yasamin Ghiasi and Barbaric Vast & Wild: A Gathering of Outside & Subterranean Poetry from Origins to Present from the “Poems for the Millenium” series with Jerome Rothenberg

The title poem, “Because I Love You, I Become War,” is a poem of feminist genius, deserving to be in the pantheon of all-time brilliant poems!
—Sascha A. Akhtar, Poetry Lecturer at Greenwich University and author of #LoveLikeBlood, Of Necessity and Wanting, and 199 Japanese Names for Japanese Trees

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A Poetry Bestseller at Small Press Distribution:

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“A Reading List for Women’s History Month,” [clmp], March 2024

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Ranked “No. 1 New Release in Asian Poetry” by Amazon:

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“From Maganda to Kerima, the poetics of Eileen Tabios” by Eunice Barbara C. Novio, Inquirer, May 2, 2023. An excerpt: “I am no stranger to Ms. Eileen Tabios’ poetry. She was the first Filipino American poet that I read and actually liked. I often compare other poets to American or British poets that I had read in college or during the time I was re-discovering poetry. It would be unfair to compare Tabios to anyone else other than herself….. / When a poem evokes mixed feelings, that’s when the readers know, that the poet has known a great many things and not just limits herself to her current environment. Like water, Tabios shape-shifts and flows through various experiences and events, that she could let you swim through her words and rediscover another world, your past, present and possibly the future.”

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“Because I love you, I become war by Eileen R. Tabios (Marsh Hawk Press)” by Rupert Loydell, Tears in the Fence, June 16, 2023: An excerpt: “Tabios quietly wonders ‘whether the reader will be as avant garde as the poet’. It’s a good question to ask about this volume, too, as those who don’t pay attention or read closely will miss just how radical and aware, how brilliantly playful and subversive, this book is.”

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A review by Susan Kay Anderson, NewPages.com, October 2023: An excerpt: “What is so magical about this collection is that we are not left hanging and lost in the dense material of this ambitious project; we are shown abundance and astounding imagination in what remains. This project is love.”

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“A review” by Maileen Hamto, Otoliths, 2023: An excerpt: “The complexity of memory and nostalgia has been a recurring theme in Tabios’ poetry and essays. In Because I love you, I become war, the poet dives headlong into the legacy of patriarchy and colonialism in the lives of Filipina (and other) women. This book is for anyone who is disgusted by the absurdity of a Marcos presidency nearly 40 years after a decades-long dictatorship left the country in economic shambles. Anyone deeply concerned about the growing threat of authoritarianism around the world will take away profound lessons.”

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An interview on the book’s poem “Candescence” conducted by Denise Low and Thomas Fink for Dichtung Yammer, May 2023.

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Featured on “A Reading List for Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month” compiled by the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP), May 2023. Also featured on CLMP’s “A Reading List for Filipino American History Month,” October 2023.

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“Freeing the Poem from the Poet,” a crafts essay on titling poems with a focus on poetry in BECAUSE I LOVE YOU, I BECOME WAR. Featured in Marsh Hawk Press’ “Chapter One” series online, April 2023.

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YouTube Video of Book Launch sponsored by the San Francisco Public Library, Philippine American Writers & Artists, and Paloma Press featuring Eileen R. Tabios, Angela Penaredondo, Barbara Jane Reyes, MT Vallarta, and Hari Alluri:

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Dunes Literary Reading Series at Indiana University Northwest presents first reading of poems and poetics prose from BECAUSE I LOVE YOU, I BECOME WAR.

Paraphrased from William Allegrezza’s Introduction: “I have a whole shelf in one of my bookcases dedicated to her work. A few years ago in an interview and in response to a question about her career as a writer, she said, ‘I have a life not a career as a writer.’ I thought, That’s perfect. Her work often combines the personal and the literary and they reshape what we think of as literature in general…. I like that because she’s blending literary genres and exploring the personal, how we construct the personal and the political…. These explorations have had a ripple effect across the American literary scene and I think her influence can be seen on the experimental writers and traditional writers, which I think is unique in itself….

“She just came out with a new book BECAUSE I LOVE YOU, I BECOME WAR…. It’s one of the best books in any genre I’ve read in years. I literally was like, I must stop writing right now because this is amazing. There’s no way I can even get in the room with this. It’s just an amazing book.”

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From NAYA

Akshay Maheshwari, a high school student at Fulton Science Academy High School, created this illustrated version of one of the book’s poems for NAYA, a “passion project” focused on Asian American artists.