Engkanto in the Diaspora
Publisher: University of Santo Tomas Publishing House
Book Order Info: USTPH Bookstore, Lazada, and Shopee, among others
Release Date: 2025
ISBN: 978-971-506-956-4
Publisher Contact: publishing@ust.edu.ph

Front Cover Artists: Book design by Oliver Ortega; Featured painting by Jose Tence Ruiz—“Pagpupugay Dos por Dos (Remake of a 1985 work burned in 1992)”, 2020. Oil and enamel on canvas, 66 x 48 in. / 167.7 x 122 cm.

Advance Words:
Eileen R. Tabios’ work as a Filipino diasporic poet and writer counters the ambiguities of nostalgia by recasting our postcolonial memory and inherited displacements into a new narrative that more fully underpins the weight and wonder of our shared kinships. In Engkanto in the Diaspora, her speaker manifests an enchanted being, sometimes capricious and always illumined, summoning kapwa into spaces forged by “magnificent indifference.” This and her broader oeuvre offer an exploration of geographies and nonlinear forms that relentlessly strive to reject our continued erasure and move us into becoming. Which is to say, take these poems as a restitution and reconstitution, a resonance “when darkness is most radiant.”
—Aileen Cassinetto, 2021 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow and 2025 Foley Poetry Prize Awardee

“In Engkanto in the Diaspora, we find the experimental works as exemplary for playing with spatiality inflected by the duration of lived experience. Both sexuality and racial identity are brought into the stage when embodied in anti-imperialist female protagonists. The staging of insurgent women heightens our awareness of the significant role that racial-gender markers and sexuality play in configuring our role and place in the international arena. This explodes the homogeneity of the Filipina as an exotic Malayan/Hispanic subject of patronizing discourse.”
—E. San Juan, Jr., Poet-scholar and Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Connecticut

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Virtual Launch Via “Lit in 5!” Interview with Aileen Cassinetto, The Halo Halo Review, Winter 2025

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“Jose Garcia Villa only has an early cameo here [in Engkanto in the Diaspora], but I can feel his presence throughout. And like all best homages, Tabios nudges me to return to JGV, but also demonstrates her creative distance. Affinities are sly humor, versatile language, dedication to explore new forms to explore new realities.”
—Jacob Laneria

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NOVEMBER 2025 UST PUBLISHING SINAG BOOK LAUNCH
(with Angela Tabios representing the author in the Philippines)

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About the Poet:

Eileen R. Tabios: “one of the foremost Filipino American poets of the 21st century.”
—Asian Week

 “[Eileen R.] Tabios’ concern for our world is global in its reach.”
—Contemporary Literary Review of India

Eileen R. Tabios: “enormous tonal range in her poetry. A breathless intensity may be her most characteristic mode.”
—kultureflash: Headlines from London

[Eileen R. Tabios] is a poet whose concern for beauty is evident.”
—International Herald Examiner Pacific Reader 

“[Eileen R.] Tabios has never been a poet to conform, she shatters the mirror. [Her] shards of images and words, both beautiful and harsh, of the comfortable and uncomfortable glitter like diamonds spilled out upon the floor.”
—North of Oxford

Eileen R. Tabios: “a restlessness, an ardent quest for a means of pure saying, for a methodology of comprehending both one’s self in the world and the world within one’s self.”
—American Book Review

Although [Eileen R. Tabios] is coming from a place of High Art, there is nothing ivory tower about her poetics. This is a balance that both street poets and academics should be seeking if we are to revitalize our worth as poets.
—New Mystics Review

One might say that [Mei-mei] Berssenbrugge and [Eileen R.] Tabios’ most important similarity is that both produce some of the most innovative work on the scene today.
—Columbia University Daily Spectator

Tabios has a remarkable ability to move from the abstract and the intellectual to the sensual and the tangible. She’s a poet of the streets, and she’s above the streets,… mapping her own consciousness wherever it takes her, even into the realm of “psychological insecurity.”
—The Press Democrat

 “Eileen Tabios has been a grand force in U.S. poetry for twenty-five years or more, and it’s difficult to think of our own time without acknowledging what a large psychic space she has made for us. The sheer volume of her writing is impressive, like the rivers of Tigris and Euphrates; among postwar Americans, maybe only Leslie Scalapino, Steve Jonas, Alice Notley and Lew Ellingham have written so much with such assurance and endless, difficult-made-easy experimentation.”
—Selected Amazon Reviews by Kevin Killian (Semiotext(e) / The MIT Press)

 “Eileen R. Tabios is one of the more adventuresome and truly creative poets before the public today.”
—San Francisco Review of Books

“One of the very most delightful things about Tabios’ writings is the way they incorporate the lyrical personal “I” and concrete experience with “avant” considerations of form and diction. She clearly feels no need to resolve tensions between the two angles. She, instead, uses them both together to “triangulate” positions for creativity and thinking…. She writes: “I don’t feel poetry should sing so much as it should think. In poetry (unlike perhaps elsewhere), thinking is not the opposite of music and, indeed, concepts can sing.” In Tabios’ work, they do—as they blend the lyrical with the conceptual.”
—The Halo Halo Review

 “[Eileen R. Tabios’] work is voluptuous, sensual, [an] incredible impressionist brush strokes of words, colors, tastes, and scents. She believes poetry must burn, and burn it does in every possible way.”
—Midwest Book Review

If you wish to follow Eileen Tabios, you will have to work hard to open all the synapses of your brain; she escapes from any classification/calculation [including any] instinctive deflection any reader has to protect him- herself, and is still there to hit, entertain, surprise, enchant, and escape.
—#allpinayeverything