WITNESS IN THE CONVEX MIRROR
ISBN-13: 978-0-9987438-9-9
TinFish Press’ Book Page
Release Date: 2019
Pages: 150
Price: $18.00
Distributors: TinFish Press, Amazon, SPD, among others.
Advance Words
“You don’t write poems like he does,” the speaker says in Eileen Tabios’ poem “Tense Past Tense.” We, the readers, immediately notice the vertigo, the joie de vivre of a playful but incisive sense of the text. She does not write like Stephane Mallarme but you can hear the sounds of his dice rolling in the poems. She does not write like John Ashbery and yet the complexity and opacity tumble in tune to the music of those sentences. WITNESS IN THE CONVEX MIRROR is Eileen Tabios’ modus opus and it should find a place in every public or private library
—Nick Carbó, author of Secret Asian Man and editor of Returning the Borrowed Tongue
Eileen Tabios cracks open Ashbery’s convex mirror to reveal a secret history of our times. Her virtuoso riffs on Ashbery’s masterwork are no mere exercise, but open up into unexpected vistas—these poems “say ‘convex’ for widening / the gaze.” That gaze is directed both inward and outward, offering glimpses of the quotidian life of those who find “mortality gazing back / at us from the bathroom mirror,” but also pulling back for a wide-angle view of a planet in crisis, chronicling “the body’s deterioration, ours and earth’s.” These pages, like Ashbery’s, are filled with the pleasures of poetry, but Tabios resists the “preening that / negates the subject matter,” unafraid to peer behind the scenes of our lives in “the dim shadows / of a movie forged from the margins / of capitalism.” The swerve of the convex mirror, allowing us a (brief) respite from confronting ourselves, is gradually replaced with an awareness of our complicity in the world reflected in the poem: “No one is / innocent in empire.” What’s left to the poet is to be “the spy / in the house,” as Tabios’s formal inventions dig behind enemy lines to open up, however briefly, a space of plentitude: “I came into being, capacious and singing.”
— Timothy Yu, author of Race and the Avant-garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965
To read Eileen R. Tabios’ WITNESS IN THE CONVEX MIRROR is “to Ashbery,” which, to paraphrase John Ashbery—arguably the greatest American poet of the 20th century—means to “imitate the way knowledge comes, by fits and starts and by indirection.” Ms. Tabios begins each poem with 1-2 lines from Mr. Ashbery’s oeuvre, before pivoting to Asia and Asian themes: “It happened while you were inside, asleep. / The penguins now grieve over the escalation / of silt in their bath. A mother begs a child, / ‘Let go. I won’t survive, but you can!’ But…” In her new book, Ms. Tabios addresses super typhoons and modern-day slavery, and homonyms and reduplicative words such as wagwag and pagpag, with aplomb and intense imagination, permanently and expertly connecting these with the hermetic nature in John Ashbery’s poetry. Read these poems as through a fish eye mirror, where the field of view is ever more expansive, and objects are always closer than they appear.
—Aileen Ibardaloza Cassinetto, San Mateo County Poet Laureate and author of The Pink House of Purple Yam Preserves & Other Poems
TinFish Press Description
When John Ashbery died in September, 2017, all the obituaries noted that he had been a member of the New York School of poets, that his roots were in western New York and that, despite living for a decade in Paris, his career had unfolded over many decades in the City. Ashbery was, indeed, something of a local poet, constantly using references from the places he had lived. Lost in the very local memorials, however, was the fact that Ashbery’s work also influenced writers in the Pacific, including writers of color. Eileen Tabios has taken up Ashbery’s influence and engaged in a project of “the browning of John Ashbery,” as she told Tinfish’s editor once. Using one or two lines at a time from Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” (1976), Tabios inhabits Ashbery’s mode, while moving our focus of attention many thousands of miles west of New York City. Tabios, who grew up in the Philippines, studied and worked in New York City, and has lived in California for many years, appropriates Ashbery to her own ends. These include cultural appropriation, genocide, militarism, sexual and racial violence, art history, and many other interests she shared—or did not share—with the older white male poet. Witness in the Convex Mirror is a tense act of homage, one that draws Ashbery away from the region that is most comfortable with him, and into a place where the discomfort is palpable, but extremely generative.
An Early Review
Tabios extends Ashbery’s narrative of seeking truths in self-reflection while using current events to expose the human condition. Alex Tizon’s story, “My Family’s Slave,” inspires the predicament of one woman taking the punishment meant for another in “Witnessed in the Convex Mirror: Avatar;” “Witnessed in the Convex Mirror: Pathos” gives us “men collecting rubber sex dolls – yes / one is not sufficient” in Japan, triggering this uncomfortable vision: “One man’s daughter receives / the doll’s hand-me-down clothes.”
—Erica Goss, Sticks & Stones Newsletter on Love in a Time of Belligerence’s poems that appear in Witness in the Convex Mirror
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Reader Response
…the more I (irresistibly) enter the poems, the more dazzled I am. Zounds. These are wonderful.
—Sheila Murphy
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Some background HERE.
An Introduction to this project is available HERE.
